A June of Ordinary Murders Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Maps

  Acknowledgments

  Friday June 17th, 1887

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Saturday June 18th, 1887

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Sunday June 19th, 1887

  Chapter Eleven

  Monday June 20th, 1887

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Tuesday June 21st, 1887

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Wednesday June 22nd, 1887

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Thursday June 23rd, 1887

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Friday June 24th, 1887

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Saturday June 25th, 1887

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Sunday June 26th, 1887

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  For Ann, Neil and Conor, with great thanks for their love and patience

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people, albeit unwittingly, have had a hand in forming the career of Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow. They include two good friends, now sadly departed: Gregory Allen, founder and first curator of the Garda Museum, and Tom O’Reilly, former Deputy Commissioner of the Garda Siochána. Much of their lore of Dublin policing is woven into the story.

  The creation of Swallow also owes an amount to historian Jim O’Herlihy whose meticulous research provides an essential backdrop to any description of Irish policing prior to independence. Similarly, Professor Donal McCracken, in his biography of John Mallon, the head of G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, has put flesh and blood on key personalities in the Dublin Castle administration of the period.

  Thus, even if Joe Swallow is an invention he is not unreal. I imagine that his ghost, along with the rest of the G-men, perhaps lingers in the courts and the narrow lanes around Dublin Castle. There may be something of their presence in the surviving brickwork of the old Police Office in the Lower Yard or in the granite of the Palace Street or Ship Street Gates.

  My late friend and former colleague, Caroline Walsh, Literary Editor of The Irish Times, told me instantly, when she learned that the tale of Joe Swallow was in gestation, ‘send it to Dermot Bolger for New Island.’

  And so I did. I would like to thank Dermot for his immediate support and encouragement and likewise I wish to thank Edwin Higel and his team at New Island. They have been constant in their enthusiasm and professionalism.

  All errors, inconsistencies and heresies in the story are, of course, of my own making.

  Conor Brady

  January 2012

  Friday June 17th, 1887

  ONE

  The place where the bodies of the adult and the child were found was cool and shadowed before the sun burned off the morning mist.

  It was on wooded ground that sloped down towards the river with a view across the city towards the mountains. Swallow knew it well. When the muttering constable with sleep in his eyes and clutching the crime report dragged himself up to the detective office from the Lower Yard of Dublin Castle, he could see it in his mind’s eye.

  This was where the boundary wall of the Phoenix Park met the granite pillars of the Chapelizod Gate, and where beech and pine trees formed a small, dense copse close by.

  At this point, the trees are trained by the wind that funnels along the valley of the River Liffey towards Dublin Bay, inclining them eastward as if permanently pointing the way to the city. Outside the wall the ground falls away towards the river with the open fields and the village of Chapelizod beyond.

  It was here, just inside the boundary wall of the park, that a keeper found the two bodies on the third morning of the extraordinary heatwave that settled on the island of Ireland in the third week of June, 1887.

  In a few days’ time the country, along with Great Britain’s other territories and possessions across the globe, would mark the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s ascent to the throne. It was as if the blue skies and sunlit days had been specially arranged to honour the Queen and Empress of half a century.

  Though it was scarcely 7 o’clock, Swallow could feel the warmth of the coming day on the nape of his neck as the police side-car bucked and swayed along Chesterfield Avenue across the park to where the bodies had been found. The city temperature had touched 86 degrees yesterday. Now the strengthening morning sun presaged more of the same.

  Dublin always took a more leisurely start to its morning, later than other cities in the industrious reign of Queen Victoria. At this early hour, the police vehicle was the only traffic on the broad, two-mile carriageway that bisects the Phoenix Park.

  Swallow had put in a fetid night as duty sergeant at the G-Division detective office at Exchange Court. There were few places more cheerless in which to spend any night. Huddled in against the northern flank of Dublin Castle, chilled in winter and airless in summer, Exchange Court had the reputation of being the unhealthiest building in the maze of blocks and alleyways that had spread out around King John’s original castle to house the administration of Ireland.

  Dublin’s police districts were denominated alphabetically. They went from the A, covering the crowded Liberties with its hungry alleys and courts and its primitive sanitation, to the F, serving the genteel coast from Blackrock to Dalkey with its spacious villas and elegant terraces.

  The plain-clothes G Division based at Exchange Court was supposedly the elite of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Its members often grumbled over the paradox of its having probably the least salubrious accommodation of all the force.

  The report of the discovery of the bodies – a man and a boy, it was said – had come in a few minutes before Swallow was due to finish his shift at 6 a.m. Now the sun’s faint warmth hinted of the denied pleasure of sleep. Behind the police vehicle, the day was forming over Dublin.

  Here the city seemed far behind. The spreading acres of the great municipal park – the largest in the Empire, it was said – were a pattern of greens. Beech, oak, chestnut and maple rose over a mantle of meadow-grass.

  At the base of the soaring Wellington Monument, erected through public subscription to commemorate the Dublin-born victor of Waterloo, a herd of the park deer grazed the soft morning grass. Picking up the sound of the p
olice carriage, the timid animals started to move away from the open space to the cover of the nearby trees.

  Swallow turned to gaze back across the park towards the bay and the mountains. Harriet would be going to her examination desk at the teacher training college soon. The first of her summer tests would start at 9 o’clock. It would be a trying day for his young sister, cooped up in a stuffy hall with the sun beating down outside. He smiled inwardly imagining her impatience as she would fill foolscap pages through the morning with commentaries on Shakespeare and the English Romantic Poets.

  As they came abreast of the Viceregal Lodge, the residence of the Queen’s deputy in Ireland, the police driver hauled the car sharply to the left, veering away from the avenue onto a narrow lane known as Acres Road. The centrifugal force of the turn obliged Swallow to clutch the brass centre-rail of the vehicle, just above the embossed harp-and-crown emblem of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

  The two Bridewell constables he had collected from their beats planted booted feet against the car’s duckboard to hold their balance. The younger nudged his companion and grinned.

  ‘Jesus, it’s as well we didn’t get any breakfast, what?’

  By rights, Swallow reckoned, he should be at Maria Walsh’s going through a plate of something substantial himself by now, and maybe addressing himself to a pint of Guinness’s porter or a mellow Tullamore whiskey. For a moment he visualised himself in her parlour above the public house on Thomas Street, his current ‘domicile’, as police terminology referred to such arrangements.

  Now the side-car was on a narrow, grassy track, leading across the open parkland.

  There was a cluster of uniforms by the copse within sight of the Chapelizod Gate. A full-bearded sergeant and two constables from the A-Division station at Kilmainham stood beside a white-haired friar. In spite of the sunshine and the incipient heat of the morning, the priest looked pale and cold.

  A few yards away, a park-keeper with a shotgun broken open across his arm was in conversation with some civilians. His gun dog sat obediently on the grass beside him, its nose twitching at the interesting scents of the morning air. From somewhere beyond the boundary wall, Swallow heard the morning squawks and clucks of barnyard fowl.

  He had been to this place before. Five years earlier the copse was one of dozens of locations in the park he had searched with colleagues investigating the murders of Ireland’s two most senior government officials, Chief Secretary Lord Cavendish and Under-Secretary Burke, by members of the extremist group, the ‘Invincibles.’

  The driver dragged on the reins and slowed the vehicle to a halt 20 yards from the group. Swallow and the two constables dismounted and strode across the grass. He recognised the bearded sergeant as Stephen Doolan, with whom he had worked before. He introduced himself for the benefit of the others.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Swallow, G Division. Where are they?’

  ‘In the trees,’ Doolan nodded towards the copse. ‘The park-keeper found them around an hour and a half ago, a man and a child – a boy.’

  The copse had been planted a century previously by the park architects so that it formed a bower or primitive pergola. From where he stood, Swallow could see a contoured shape under a grey blanket between the trunks of two giant beeches.

  ‘I’ve kept everyone a way back from the scene since we got here, including the priest,’ Doolan said, gesturing towards the civilians. ‘What might have happened before that, I don’t know.’

  Swallow grunted in approval. Not every uniformed DMP sergeant knew or cared enough about crime investigation to preserve a scene properly, but the veteran Doolan knew his business. Swallow and he went back a long way.

  They walked the few yards to the copse. The sun had started to filter through the branches of the high beech, dappling the ground underfoot. Swallow saw that there was not just one, but two blankets.

  He dropped to his haunches by the trunk of one of the trees. Doolan brought his bulk down on one knee and grasped the nearer blanket.

  ‘D’you want to see the man or the child first?’

  ‘Let’s see the man.’

  Swallow was unsure why he felt it might be easier that way. Perhaps he wanted to put off what he knew would be the more unpalatable sight. He indicated the covered shape on the ground, and Doolan lifted the grey blanket.

  The body appeared to be that of a slightly built man, clothed in a dark jacket and trousers with an off-white shirt. It lay on its back, what remained of the face turned to the morning sky.

  Swallow instinctively removed his hat as a gesture of respect.

  The features had been terribly mutilated. The eyes were sockets of red turning to black. The skin, from the jawline to the forehead and from one ear to the other, was marked with a series of gashes. Only bloodied gristle remained of the nose. There was a full head of dark brown hair, cut short. Swallow reckoned him to be young, maybe in his twenties.

  Doolan folded the blanket and dropped to one knee. ‘You wouldn’t see many as bad as that,’ he said softly.

  Swallow concurred silently. More than 20 years as a city policeman had inured him to sights of death and injury. Momentarily, he was reminded of a scene from his days in uniform where a young inmate had put her face in a mincing machine at the kitchens of the Richmond Asylum.

  He had taught himself to isolate his emotions at times like this. His technique involved not thinking of what lay before him as an individual human being who had been breathing, eating, drinking or perhaps making love just a few hours previously. That would come later when they would have a name and an identity, humanising this broken thing on the ground.

  What was important for now was detail. He drew out his notebook and pencil and started to record what he saw.

  The left arm was flung out to the side at an angle of 45 degrees, the right arm folded across the chest.

  The clothing was not noticeably disturbed. The jacket and trousers were clean and seemed in good repair. An off-white cotton shirt, buttoned to the neck but collarless, was spattered with blood. Seven or eight feet from the head a black, soft-brimmed hat lay upturned on the ground.

  On the left side of the forehead, just below the hairline, there was a clear, circular hole, the size of a small coin. It formed the apex of an acute triangle with its base at the two craters where the eyes had once been. Swallow drew an oval to represent the face on the open page of the notebook and marked the location of the wound in relation to the eye cavities.

  He moved close to the corpse and squatted so that he could examine the clothing by touch. He felt the fabric of the jacket between his thumb and forefinger. It was relatively new, but of indifferent quality.

  When he touched his fingers against the corpse’s right hand it was cold and solid.

  He moved to the feet of the corpse and squatted again. The boots showed wear, but they had been neatly patched in two places on the uppers. He drew two outlines in the notebook and marked the location of the patches on each one.

  Doolan rose to his full height and moved to where the other blanket was draped across a smaller form a couple of feet away.

  ‘This won’t be easy either,’ Doolan said. He lifted the second blanket to reveal a small, huddled form, lying in the foetal position on its right side with bare legs drawn up towards the stomach. The boy was perhaps 8 or 9 years old. His hands were clasped together in front of him with the fingers interlocked. The head was turned upward across the left shoulder, so Swallow could see the same destruction of the face, just as with the adult lying nearby.

  The eyes were all but gone under the open lids. In their place were two small caverns of bloodied space. On the pale forehead, above where the left eye should have been, the same circular wound penetrated through flesh and bone to reveal brain matter within the skull. The dark hair, cut short, looked healthy and glossy. The child’s mouth was open with the gums visible as if he were still screaming in the shock tremor that marked the end of his life.

  A scene from his childhood
years in the County Kildare countryside swam into his mind.

  A man ploughing the land near Swallow’s home at Newcroft had uncovered what appeared to be human bones. At first, he thought they were the remains of famine victims, perhaps a family that had starved or died of exposure or disease. When the priest was called he told the farmer that he had stumbled on a prehistoric burial chamber. People travelled long distances to see it as the news spread.

  Swallow’s father had taken him by the hand across the fields to gaze down at the yellow-grey bones in the pit. One of the smaller skeletons was crouched in the same foetal position as the dead child he was now looking at.

  A few days later, men came from the new museum in Dublin and took the bones away in a wooden box. They stopped at the Swallow family pub, Newcroft House, before taking the open car that brought them to the train at the town of Kildare. While they were drinking, one of the men from the museum told his father that the skeletons were 4,000 years old.

  He got to his feet. ‘Have we any identification at all, Stephen?’

  ‘Nothing. I went through the pockets. There’s no wallet, no watch, no rings on any of the fingers, no letters. Not even a tram ticket. Nothing in the lad’s pockets either.’

  Swallow pointed to the circular wound on the forehead. ‘What do you make of that? And the same mark on the child?’

  Doolan scratched his chin through his dark beard as if seeking inspiration. ‘They’re surely bullet wounds. But there should be exit wounds too. And I can’t see any.’

  Swallow moved back to squat beside the body again. He went through the pockets of the trousers and jacket. Doolan was right. There was nothing.

  ‘Do you think the park-keeper might have lifted a wallet or a watch? Or anyone else?’

  Doolan shook his head. ‘I can’t say it didn’t happen. The park-keeper’s fairly shaken himself, though. He lives down in the village in Chapelizod. He says it was the dog that brought him over here, barking and yelping.’

  Swallow reached to the adult corpse’s left arm from where it lay across the grass. The hand was surprisingly small. There were no signs of physical labour.