A June of Ordinary Murders

Conor Brady

• Publisher: New Island
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781848401525
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Kriminal- & Mysterienliteratur

The first book in a pacey and evocative detective series set in Victorian Dublin. In the 1880s the DMP classified crime in two distinct classes. Political crimes were 'special', whereas theft, robbery and even murder, no matter how terrible, were 'ordinary'. Dublin, June 1887: the mutilated bodies of a man and a child are discovered in Phoenix Park and Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow steps up to investigate. Cynical and tired, Swallow is a man living on past successes in need of a win. In the background, the city is sweltering in a long summer heatwave, a potential gangland war is simmering as the chief lieutenants of a dying crime boss size each other up and the castle administration want the celebration of Queen Victoria s Golden jubilee to pass off without complication. Underneath it all, the growing threat of anti-British radicals is never far away. With the Land War at its height, the priority is to contain special crime. But these murders appear to be ordinary and thus of lesser priority. When the evidence suggests high-level involvement, and as the body count increases, Swallow must navigate the waters of foolish superiors, political directives and frayed tempers to investigate the crime, find the true murderer and deliver justice. A June Of Ordinary Murders captures the life and essence of Dublin in the 1880s and draws the reader on a thrilling journey of murder and intrigue.

SEVEN

Immediately he had parted with Mallon in the Lower Castle Yard, Swallow sensed that there was a problem.

Harry Lafeyre’s carriage should have been standing in the stable yard behind the DMP building. It wasn’t there. That meant that Lafeyre would not be in his office as arranged to brief Swallow on his post-mortem examination.

Swallow was a few minutes late. Lafeyre was usually punctual, and he had been left in no doubt that the investigation of the double murder by the Chapelizod Gate was a priority. If he was not at his office as arranged either something must have gone wrong with the post-mortem schedule, or some medical emergency had taken priority.

Doctor and detective had worked together on perhaps a score of difficult homicides. Not all were murders, for murder was not a very frequent occurrence in Dublin. Some were suicides, others deaths by misadventure. Most of them started as a mystery, a blank sheet upon which they worked hand-in-hand, methodically and patiently, filling in the empty spaces, gradually converting the unknown into the known, building comprehension where once there had been mystery.

Harry Lafeyre was from a Huguenot family in Queen’s County. He had followed his medical degree at Trinity College with a diploma in medical jurisprudence at Edinburgh, studying under the celebrated Professor Alfred Taylor. After that he enrolled for a three-year tour as Medical Officer to the Cape Colony Mounted Police. It was a decision that puzzled and hurt his father, a second-generation country doctor whose hope it had been that his son would come home to continue the family practice.

For a time, Lafeyre once told Swallow, he had thought he would make his life and career in Africa. Athletic and adventurous, he relished the outdoor life on the veld. He became a skilled horseman and a crack shot with the smooth-bore game rifle.

But when an affair of the heart involving the daughter of a district Commissioner went wrong he learned that Africa could be a very lonely place. He decided to return to Europe. When he did so, it was to Dublin.

His part-time services had been engaged by the Castle authorities. Lafeyre was a rare combination of talents and qualifications: a doctor, a crime examiner and a man with experience of police work. The civil servants in the Castle knew a bargain when they saw one. He was put on a modest retainer that supplemented the private practice he embarked upon from his house-cum-surgery in Harcourt Street.

In addition, he had been appointed as a Justice of the Peace. It gave him the necessary authority to issue warrants when his examination might require a search of premises or a seizure of evidence.

Six months ago, he and Lily Grant had announced their engagement to be married. Maria Walsh had introduced him to her younger sister when Swallow and the medical examiner were having a quiet drink in the parlour after a late-night post mortem. Lily had finished term at her college and had come to stay for a few nights with her older sister before travelling to England to enrol in a summer painting course.

Swallow found himself cheered by their company. Lily’s training in art and his amateur enthusiasm gave them a point of common interest. She and Lafeyre made a lively and attractive couple. There were times when Swallow envied them the clarity of their intentions with a marriage date fixed for the springtime of the year ahead.

Joe Swallow’s formation had been different. His family’s public house drew its clientele from the army and from the racing business. The Curragh Camp was one of the largest military installations in the British Isles, and some of the finest bloodstock in the world was bred and trained in the countryside around Newcroft.

Business was solid in Swallow’s childhood years. There was comfort and relative prosperity, even though the starvation and disease that came in the aftermath of the Famine had devastated villages and townlands just a few miles away. His parents’ ambition was to make Joseph a doctor. With hard work and prudent management there would be enough money to achieve it.

Then he wasted two years of his life and a great deal of their savings in the public houses and music halls around the Catholic University’s Medical School. When the money ran out, and when the illness that was to end his father’s life was diagnosed, his options were few.

He thought about the army. He considered America. Then he heard that the Dublin Metropolitan Police was recruiting.

Unrest over poor pay and harsh conditions had come to a head a few years previously. Dublin’s police were notoriously badly paid. Basic pay trailed well behind any tradesman’s wages and the families of married constables often lived in want.

Some policemen resigned to try their luck with English or Scottish forces. Others were disciplined by the authorities and forced to resign. When the Commissioner got clearance to start filling vacancies, pay rates were improved with the aim of forestalling any further trouble.

Joe Swallow had the height requirement and the chest measurement. He went on the dry, staying away from alcohol for a month before sitting the written tests at the Kevin Street depot. After that, he was in. While he continued to enjoy his drink, it never again became an obstacle to completing his work.

On the contrary, Swallow’s work had become his life. From regular and heavy alcohol abuse, he changed to become a driven police officer. Long and irregular hours of work had taken the place of the extended drinking sessions. There was little time for a social life and none for seeking out romance or a life partner. He would be 43 at his coming birthday. He knew he did not have all the time in the world.

Perhaps Lafeyre’s assistant, Scollan, was in the office already, Swallow surmised. There might be a message. Or Scollan might have some knowledge of his master’s whereabouts. He set out towards the medical examiner’s office when he saw Scollan turning Lafeyre’s carriage across the cobblestones of the Palace Street Gate.

Swallow reached the office door just as Harry Lafeyre stepped down from the brougham. He could see from the medical examiner’s grim expression that the news was bad.

‘We’ll go upstairs,’ Lafeyre said tersely, striding through the door towards the rickety wooden staircase.

On the first landing he flung open a heavy door, layered with generations of cracked paint. The words ‘OFFICE OF THE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER’ were stencilled across the upper panels.

‘We’ll have some tea if you please, Scollan,’ Lafeyre called over his shoulder as he led the way into his inner office.

Lafeyre gestured Swallow to a chair at the end of a trestle table. He was already perspiring in the heat of the morning. He removed his jacket and threw it expertly to catch the arm of a coat stand against the wall.

‘My God, that’s a day when one should be a free man, not stuck in a hole like this,’ he said without pleasure.

Perfect rectangles of blue sky shone through the 12-paned windows that gave out onto the Lower Yard behind Lafeyre’s desk. Swallow, though, was not in a mood to hear about the weather.

‘I got up here as fast as I could,’ Lafeyre said. You won’t want to hear what I’ve got to tell you. I take it you’ve been in with Chief Mallon?’

‘Yes, I’ve just left him.’

The medical examiner groaned. ‘Oh Jesus, I’m sorry.’

‘Will you for God’s sake tell me what the problem is?’ Swallow asked sharply.

Lafeyre raised his hand as if to calm him. ‘I couldn’t make a start on the post mortems last evening as I promised. The blasted electricity at Marlborough Street failed. The light from the gas is so poor that I thought it better to hold off until this morning, so I arranged to start as early as I could.’

He paused. ‘I knew you were meeting Mallon. I hoped I’d have some report for you before that. But... something very unexpected emerged… I stopped the examination right away and got here as quickly as I could. We’ve made fools of ourselves – I as much as you – more so, indeed.’

‘Will you for the love of Jesus tell me what you’re talking about?’ Swallow said, apprehension now giving way to alarm.

Lafeyre raised his hands in exasperation.

‘It’s the dead man, Joe.’ He paused. ‘It isn’t a man. It’s a woman.’

Swallow felt sick.

He heard himself, just moments ago, describe to Mallon what he had seen inside the Chapelizod Gate. He saw himself with the reporters in the park. He saw the headlines of the newspaper reports, based on what he had said. He saw Mallon with Commissioner Harrel trying to put distance between his detective sergeant and the warped prose of the Daily Sketch.

He was destroyed.

‘A woman?’ he repeated. ‘Are you telling me what we saw up there by the Chapelizod Gate was a dead woman – not a dead man?’

‘Yes. It’s not a mistake that a trained physician will easily make when the clothing is cut away,’ Lafeyre said in sarcasm.

‘But it’s a mistake that might occur when a woman has disguised herself in a loose-fitting man’s suit, when her hair is short and when the face is effectively destroyed. You were fooled, so were the others, so was I.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Swallow tried to bring the scene back in detail in his mind’s eye. ‘I thought he was small and slight. But I never thought…’

‘I know,’ Lafeyre said sympathetically. ‘I wish I’d been able to get to you before you reported to Mallon. It’s bad enough to have given the pressmen a wrong steer. I know they’ll have a field day with it.’

It would be more trouble to add to the trouble he had already, Swallow reflected gloomily. His credibility with Mallon was already, if unfairly, damaged. This could undermine it completely.

It also added a bizarre new twist to the investigation. What was a woman doing dressed as a man, with a child, in the Phoenix Park, both now dead? He tried to imagine some set of circumstances that might fit with the facts as he was hearing them anew. Was it a charade, a disguise perhaps? Did the dead woman choose to wear a man’s outfit or was she forced to do so? Were they her own clothes or did they belong to somebody else?

‘Christ, this is bad. How am – how are we – going to explain this? The G Division’s celebrated crime detective and the city medical examiner can’t tell a man from a woman when there’s a corpse lying out in front of them?’

Lafeyre nodded to the clock on the wall.

‘You’ve more than an hour before your crime conference. We’ll go back to Marlborough Street. I’ll get a good start on the post mortems in that time. By 11 o’clock you might have something more that you can tell them. And maybe something to stave off Mallon’s anger.’

The office door opened and Scollan entered carrying a tray with an Indian-style tea service. It was one of Lafeyre’s souvenirs from the Cape Colony. He set it down, scowling, on the trestle and made to shuffle away.

‘We won’t take that tea now, Scollan,’ Lafeyre told him. ‘We’re going back to Marlborough Street immediately.’

‘Was it a tough meeting with Mallon?’ Lafeyre asked as the carriage turned out through the Palace Street Gate. ‘You didn’t seem to be the happiest man in Dublin even before I opened my mouth to you.’

Swallow nodded.

‘There’s a lot of bullshit in the newspapers this morning. I’m quoted by Irving in the Sketch as saying I have no clues and that I’m not concerned about this case. You were there, Harry, you heard what I said and it wasn’t anything like that.’

‘I don’t read the newspapers to find out about anything I’m involved in myself. They say that anything you read in the newspapers is right unless it’s something you actually know about.’

Swallow chuckled mirthlessly.

‘That puts it well enough. Mallon says there’ll be trouble with the Commissioner over it. He’ll do his best to dampen it down, but he’s getting pressure on all fronts. There’s the Jubilee and a bloody royal visit next week. Anything could happen with the politicals when that’s going on. And you probably know that Ces Downes died last night.’

‘Sure, those are problems,’ Lafeyre replied, ‘but they’re not your immediate problem. Your immediate problem is a dead woman and child in the park, murdered and with no identification.’

‘And the fact that for the first 24 hours of the investigation I thought the woman was a man. Jesus, it sounds brilliant, doesn’t it?’

‘There’s some good news,’ Lafeyre said. ‘Or at least there’s something that might help to explain our way out of the mistake. The photographer developed his prints from the scene last night and left them at the morgue for me this morning.’

He took a manila file from his bag and brought out two photographic prints of the dead man – or woman, as it now turned out to be. One showed the body, lying under the beech trees. The other was a facial cl...