A Hunt in Winter

Conor Brady

• Publisher: New Island
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781848405295
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

Joe Swallow, newly promoted to detective inspector, is back, and life looks to be taking a turn for the better. But his new-found peace will soon be chaotically upturned, with far-reaching consequences.
In Dublin, a series of violent attacks against women leads to an outbreak of panic and fear, and things on the home front are about to change in an unexpected way. In London, Charles Stewart Parnell tirelessly pursues the Irish cause for Home Rule. While the British are eager to discredit the Irish parliamentary leader and to quash the growing movement towards independence, Swallow's conflicted loyalties pull him in different directions. Swallow has no choice but to traverse this volatile political scene, while his continuing hunt for a terrifying killer takes him across Europe in pursuit. Conor Brady brings Victorian Dublin vividly to life in the third thrilling installment of the bestselling Joe Swallow series.

Saturday November 3rd, 1888

ONE

Swallow disliked Saturdays. Most policemen felt that way, he reckoned. Perhaps more precisely, Swallow disliked the day that followed Friday night. Friday was payday for those citizens of Dublin fortunate enough to have employment, however poorly rewarded it might be. By late Friday night a sizeable proportion of men’s meagre wages would be on the way back to the breweries and distilleries—Arthur Guinness, John Jameson and John Power. There was always trouble on Friday nights: street fights, brawls in public houses, misadventures of every variety, with broken bodies in the hospitals and sometimes dead ones in the mortuary.

Because the Dublin Magistrates’ Courts did not sit on Saturdays, the police cells were invariably filled to capacity. And with the growing trend for businesses to give employees a half-day off on Saturday afternoon, it was often impossible to advance police inquiries after noontime. Many commercial offices closed for the afternoon. Schools closed at noon, releasing their charges to engage in whatever mischief might present itself. Invariably, the latter part of the day was forfeit.

Swallow’s strategy to offset Saturday’s adversities was to start the day earlier. The morning crime conference at Exchange Court, the headquarters of G-Division at Dublin Castle, was ordinarily timed for nine o’clock. The night’s crime tallies would be set out and the day’s tasks allocated. But on Saturdays he brought it forward to half past eight. That way he could ensure that all available detectives were at their posts or out on their inquiries for the full duration of the morning.

Since his promotion to detective inspector, Swallow had sharpened up procedures at Exchange Court. His predecessor, Maurice (‘Duck’) Boyle, since elevated to superintendent and posted to take charge of the E-district, headquartered in leafy Rathmines, had been notoriously lazy and undemanding. Swallow, on the other hand, insisted on punctuality and a strict adherence to procedure. Report-writing had to be accurate, clear and up-to-date. Cash drawn for informants had to be accounted for in full and not frittered away on unnamed and often fictitious informants in public houses. There was grumbling from some, but the greater number among the G-men, as the detectives short-handed their designation, supported his approach.

The bedroom on the top floor above M & M Grant’s public house on Thomas Street, in the old city quarter known as the Liberties, was cold when he woke. He looked past Maria’s sleeping form beside him to the window and saw that the glass was fern-patterned with the first frost of winter. He rose, then washed and shaved quietly across the corridor in the room which, for the sake of decorum, was always referred to as ‘Mr Swallow’s room’. As far as outward appearances were concerned, the young, widowed Mrs Walsh and the detective inspector were simply landlady and tenant. Maria’s servants knew differently, of course, as did many of the patrons of M & M Grant’s, Maria’s public house below. So too did most of Swallow’s senior colleagues in G-Division, even though it was against police regulations to board on licensed premises, much less to share a bed with the licensee.

The servants observed the fiction of attending to the tenant’s room in accordance with respectability and convention. Each morning Swallow would leave his soiled clothing in the linen basket in his room to be collected for laundering later in the day by Tess, Maria’s housemaid. Every evening Tess carefully laid out a clean collar and shirt at the foot of the bed and changed the water in the glazed pitcher on the washstand.

It required concentration to work with the razor, soap and cold water in the dim morning light. Although most of the G-men followed the fashion of the time with moustaches or beards, Swallow preferred to go clean-shaven. It made him look younger than his forty-three years, he reckoned. Maria said she thought so too.

The morning darkness had not fully dissipated when he stepped out into Thomas Street through the side door that gave private access to the living quarters above the public house.

At St Catherine’s Church, where the rebel Robert Emmet had been executed after the abortive insurrection of 1803, he saw that the November frost had whitened the classical pediment and the black roof slates. He passed the Municipal Art School where on Thursday afternoons, duty permitting, he indulged his sole diversion from police work in the painting class led by Maria’s sister, Lily. Then he crossed High Street and Corn Market before flanking Christ Church Cathedral towards the Castle.

The streets were quiet. Dubliners were neither early to bed nor early risers. The city’s trams did not stir until eight o’clock, when they started from their depots. Shops did not open their doors until half past nine. Many professional men considered it unseemly to be at their rooms before ten. The only sign of life at this hour was a uniformed constable, motionless and solid, surveying the silent thoroughfare from Lamb Alley.

He caught the tang of hops from Guinness’s brewery at St James’s Gate, and a couple of hundred yards farther on the husky smell of barley wafted in the air from Power’s distillery on John’s Lane. It was telling, he sometimes reflected, that while other cities might smell of coal or food or human sweat, Dublin smelled primarily of alcoholic drink in the making.

He quickened his pace so that he would be at his desk by eight o’clock to review the night’s crime reports from the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s seven divisions. Any serious business, he knew, would very likely come from A, B, C or D, which served the city within the canals. E-Division and F-Division, covering the affluent suburbs to the south as far as Dalkey, rarely saw much crime or outrage.

Swallow was more at ease living back in the Liberties. During the previous year he rented a small house near Portobello, sharing it with his sister, Harriet. It suited her because it was close to the school in which she taught on the South Circular Road. But at the start of the new school year, and with his promotion confirmed, he had returned to live with Maria over Grant’s.

The public house had come down in the female line, but it kept the name of Maria’s grandfather Michael, who ran the business with his brother, Matthew. When Maria married Thomas Walsh in 1882 she saw no need to change it. The marriage had been happy but tragically short. Thomas drowned with his fellow crew members when the small cargo ship of which he was first officer went down in a gale off the Welsh coast five years later.

From Grant’s, it was just a ten-minute walk to the detective office at Exchange Court, beside the City Hall. On a sharp, clear morning like this the exercise was stimulating. It loosened the muscles and cleared the head for the tasks of the day. He listed them mentally as he walked. At least those he could predict. Nobody could guess what the night’s crime reports might bring in.

G-Division’s fifty-odd detectives investigated crime across the city, and were also the administration’s first and principal bulwark against political subversion. Their responsibilities ran from protecting the chief men who governed Ireland for the Crown to keeping watch on Fenians, Land Leaguers and the ever-multiplying groups that wanted, for one reason or another, to overthrow the established order.

The uniformed men who patrolled the divisions were unarmed, indistinguishable to all intents and purposes from the helmeted bobbies of any other city of the United Kingdom. But in addition to the standard police accoutrements of baton, whistle and handcuffs, every man of G-Division carried a .44 Webley Bulldog revolver.

Swallow considered what the day might bring. There was to be a public rally at the Mansion House in the afternoon. It would be addressed by the founder of the Land League, the charismatic one-armed militant Michael Davitt. Davitt was a powerful orator and would always draw a crowd. It would require half a dozen G-men, spread across the great Round Room of the Mansion House, to record the presence of suspected persons and to take down an account of what was said from the platform.

The leader of the Irish Party at Westminster, Charles Stewart Parnell, was travelling from London and would arrive at Kingstown on the four o’clock mailboat. Two G-men would be on hand. Officially they would be on protection duty, but there would be as much surveillance and intelligence-gathering involved as protecting Parnell from possible threats. They would carefully record who accompanied him, who greeted him at Kingstown and where they went.

The government’s principal civil servant for Ireland, Chief Secretary Sir Arthur Balfour, and his wife would be attending a luncheon at the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge. The ultra-loyal RDS was the least likely location for trouble, but since the murders five years previously in the Phoenix Park of the chief secretary’s predecessor in office, Sir Frederick Cavendish, along with his under-secretary, no chances could be taken. The protection detail would require the presence in concealment of two armed detectives and a sergeant.

Three G-men were engaged in watching the movements of two Irish-American gentlemen staying at the Imperial Hotel. The word from a helpful porter was that they were former Union Army officers with guns to sell. So far their principal focus appeared to be on drinking whiskey and making passes at the barmaids, but they had left word with the porter that they were expecting visitors. G-men would be required to take shifts sitting in the hotel bar, watching for someone to make a rendezvous.

Swallow also needed two men to operate the public office and the cells at Exchange Court. That should leave him with a paltry strength of three or four to cope with whatever the crime reports might bring in.

The moment he stepped into Exchange Court he knew from the face of the young G-man at the public counter that things were not good.

‘Bad story out in the E, sir.’ He jerked his head towards the stairs. ‘Sergeant Mossop’s above. He’s just ahead of you.’ Pat Mossop had been duty sergeant for the night shift that had just ended. Swallow took the stairs to the crime office two at a time.

Mossop, recently promoted to detective sergeant, was hunched at his desk. Detective Johnny Vizzard, newly arrived in G-Division on promotion from uniform, was perched beside him, his fingers poised over the typewriter. Mossop looked tired, as he always did now. A year ago the diminutive Belfast man had taken a bullet in the upper torso as G-men closed on an armed suspect on Ormond Quay. Strictly speaking, Pat Mossop should have been dead. Had his colleagues not got him swiftly to the infirmary on Jervis Street, he would have been.

‘Something big, Pat?’

‘Big enough, boss. E-district. Rathmines Road. A bad assault. Could be more than that. I thought I’d have the r...