The Eloquence of the Dead (39 page)

‘Lady Gessel, may I introduce Chief Superintendent Mallon … and his sergeant,' the manager clearly had forgotten Swallow's name.

‘Lady Gessel,' Mallon said politely with a small nod. ‘This is Sergeant Swallow.'

Margaret Gessel smiled. ‘Mr Mallon, I've heard a lot about you.'

She turned to Swallow. ‘Good morning, Sergeant Swallow. What an unusual name.'

‘Yes Lady Gessel. It's French I think, probably Norman.'

The manager withdrew, and Margaret Gessel took the sofa opposite the two G-men. Her features were still striking, Swallow reflected. She had the fresh, supple skin of a woman who had taken care of herself. Her hair was grey, but thick and perfectly coiffed. Her eyes were bright, blue and curious.

When she folded her hands in her lap, Swallow saw that they were strong and bony. Hands that had done work, tamed horses and, it seemed, learned how to use firearms. He thought he could see the arthritis-like signs of a broken index finger.

‘I'm sorry to learn what happened on Saturday night at your home, Lady Gessel,' Mallon started. ‘A terrible experience for anyone, and especially for a woman on her own.'

She tossed her head.

‘After twenty years of the Land Leaguers and their friends, a criminal type from the back lanes of London offers no threat to me, I can assure you, Mr Mallon.'

‘Our colleagues at Great Scotland Yard believe that he intended to do you harm,' Swallow said. ‘It's lucky that you were able to defend yourself so well.'

‘You make your own luck, Sergeant. In this instance, it was the luck of a .32 Smith and Wesson five-shot revolver, plus the fact that I have a steady hand and a sharp eye.'

‘Indeed,' Mallon said. ‘Before we go any further, I'd like to express my appreciation of the fact that you've been willing to come to Dublin to assist us. Do you have any idea of why you might have been a target for harm?'

Her eyes flashed with anger.

‘I can only imagine. The detective from Scotland Yard wasn't telling me much. He said that you would do that. Something about the sale of Mount Gessel, I understand.'

‘That's correct, yes.'

‘Well, I'm damned if I'm going to be threatened in my own home, Mr Mallon. And if there's anything I can do to bring the law down on whoever is behind the attack on me at this stage of my life, by heaven I'll do it. So, tell me what I can do.'

‘We suspect there's been some serious irregularity in the sale of Mount Gessel, and perhaps in the sale of other properties.' Swallow said. ‘But so far we haven't been able to identify it with precision. We suspect that at least one person has been murdered to cover this up. There may be more. Professional criminals were sent here from London to try to silence possible witnesses. The attack on you was probably an attempt to prevent you giving evidence as well.'

She seemed momentarily shaken, pausing to consider Swallow's words.

‘Evidence? Evidence of what?'

‘We don't know,' Mallon said. ‘We hoped that, by going through what we know of the sale of your former property, you might be able to spot something that would point us in the right direction.'

‘We've seized the papers relating to the sale and the redistribution from the solicitors' office here in Dublin,' Swallow said. ‘We've worked our way through all the sales, and we don't seem to be able to find anything out of the ordinary.'

She raised her hands in a gesture of exasperation. ‘I don't understand. Mount Gessel wasn't an especially big estate. We're talking about 950 acres divided among, what, seventy families? If there's an irregularity, as you call it, it should be easy enough to identify it.'

Swallow almost heard the click in his brain as he registered what Margaret Gessel had just said.

‘I'm sorry Lady Gessel, how many acres did you say?'

‘About 950. It was actually 952 and a few square perches.'

‘You're sure of those figures Ma'am?'

She sighed impatiently.

‘Of course I'm sure, Mr Swallow. If you handled the rent books and the accounts of an estate for twenty years like I did, you'd be sure too.'

‘What's your point, Sergeant?' Mallon asked.

‘The point is that all the documents I've seen indicate that the Mount Gessel estate comprised almost 1,200 acres.'

‘Absolute nonsense,' Margaret Gessel said.

Swallow felt a delightful surge of comprehension.

‘That's it,' he slapped the side of the sofa. ‘That's how they've been doing it! God, the sheer simplicity of it. They overstate the size of the acreage to be transferred. The Treasury pays out for land that doesn't exist. The extra money is creamed off, and nobody's the wiser.'

Margaret Gessel was exasperated. ‘I got my price. £45 an acre, that's what I was offered and that's what I got. So who are the “they” who are “creaming off money,” as you put it?'

Mallon grimaced. ‘I don't think we know the answer to that yet, but I can tell you we're a good deal closer to it than we were before we had this conversation.'

‘And the other thing I can tell you,' Swallow added, ‘is that there's got to be a few people involved in this.'

‘I don't understand,' she said. ‘Who's involved?'

‘The scheme is simple,' Swallow explained. ‘A couple of hundred fictitious acres were added to your property when the Treasury was asked to put up money for the purchase. To get away with that, it must have been necessary to put up false maps and false certificates. I believe it required the involvement of at least one dishonest lawyer or law clerk, maybe more than one. It probably involved a bank or banker. And it had to involve someone, or more than one person, in the administration.'

Margaret Gessel shook her head in disbelief. She reached to the bell-pull beside the sofa.

‘I don't know about you gentlemen, but I need a very large sherry to cope with this. Will you join me?'

They both declined.

‘I am not a young as I was, Sergeant, so I may have difficulty picking up details. So may I ask you explain to me how this is connected with the fact that the Gessel silver and my late husband's great uncle's collection of ancient coins are for sale in the shops in Dublin?'

‘They were misappropriated by a dishonest law clerk engaged in the sale of your estate,' Swallow said. ‘I believe the silver was sold or passed to Ambrose Pollock, a pawnbroker here in the city, who was a receiver of stolen goods. Somehow, someone else involved in the fraud heard about it. They knew their enterprise was at risk if these items were to find their way onto the open market.'

‘I can see that.'

‘So the person or persons engaged in the fraud decided to silence anybody who might have known about the theft of the silver and the coins,' Swallow said. ‘The pawnbroker was murdered in his shop. Another woman who innocently bought some of the coins was attacked and might well have suffered the safe fate. It just happened that I came on the scene at her shop here in the city. And the attempt on your own life confirms the deadly intention of these people,' Mallon said.

‘So what are you going to do, Mr Mallon? I certainly hope that these people can be brought to justice.'

‘We'll need you to examine all the documents we have in relation to the transfer of the estate. And we'll need you to sign a statement that you never authorised the disposal of the silver or the coins to Pollock, the pawnbroker.'

‘I'll certainly do that. I'll do anything within reason to get these … bastards.'

 

FRIDAY OCTOBER 14
TH
, 1887

 

SEVENTY-ONE

Margaret Gessel identified the last missing pieces of the jigsaw almost immediately she joined Swallow and Mossop in the Windsor Room the following morning.

Mossop had laid out the remaining deeds of transfer that she had not yet examined on the rosewood table. To Swallow's eye, there were fewer than a dozen to be checked. Margaret Gessel looked tired, he thought. She had put a lot of energy into her task yesterday. This morning she showed her years a little more, but she was energetic and keen to get on.

‘Deed number seventy-one, Lady Gessel,' Mossop said, handing her the first of the documents, lightly tied with green ribbon. She undid the ribbon and peered at the papers.

‘This is nonsense, a fabrication,' she exclaimed almost immediately, waving the deed. ‘There's no such holding, no such tenant and no such purchaser.'

She spread it on the tabletop.

‘Fifteen acres, two square perches and two square roods at Clonanish or someplace so called, to be allocated to Michael Bartley Fahy. There's no such person, never has been anywhere near Mount Gessel.'

‘Are you sure?' Swallow asked. ‘There might be some mistake.'

‘Sergeant Swallow, do you think I don't know my tenants, each and every one of them? And the size of every holding on the Mount Gessel estate? Please don't insult my intelligence. This document is a fraud, a forgery.'

Within half an hour she had pronounced nine other deeds to be fraudulent. Mossop tallied the acreage of the fictitious holds.

‘It's exactly 202 acres, Boss.'

‘That's the difference between the size of the estate as you confirm it,' Swallow told her, ‘and the land paid for by the Government.'

‘I can damned well count too,' she snapped. ‘I can see what's happened.'

An hour later, Swallow was with John Mallon in the Under-Secretary's office in the Upper Castle Yard.

The assembled cast was much the same as the previous meeting two days before. Smith Berry and Major Kelly sat against the wall, backs stiff against their chairs.

‘It's simple, Sir,' Mallon told West Ridgeway. ‘Brazen too, if I may say so. They simply added on fictitious holdings of land and submitted them for payment by the Treasury. Then they pocketed the difference. In this instance I reckon the profit would have been in the order of £9,000. And the question then is, if Clinton did it in the case of the Mount Gessel estate, did he do it in others?'

‘It can't be as simple as that,' West Ridgeway said. ‘There had to be checks on the transactions.'

‘That's why we sent Inspector Boyle down at the Land Office, Sir,' Mallon replied. ‘But somebody in the Treasury must have responsibility for checking these transactions against the survey maps and then certifying that all's in order. Clinton didn't act alone. This couldn't have done without inside help.'

‘Have we any idea how many other estates this fellow Clinton handled?' Smith Berry asked.

‘There's at least five others that I know he was involved in,' Swallow said. ‘But we haven't gone near those files yet.'

‘So it could be five times the amount?'

‘It could be very much greater,' Mallon said. ‘If there are other law firms where the same dodge is going on, this may be a much more widespread problem.'

West Ridgeway looked shocked. ‘Are … you … serious, Mr Mallon?'

‘We just don't know. Clinton was a follower, not a leader. I suspect we'll find that someone else, very much smarter and very much more manipulative, is behind all this.'

‘What do you do next?' West Ridgeway asked.

‘I need a warrant to seize the papers at the Treasury Office in the Custom House that relate to the sale of the Mount Gessel estate. We need to find who signed off there on the fictitious land sales.'

‘You'll have it within the hour, Mr Mallon. In the meantime, nobody must know about this outside our group. We don't need a political crisis.'

‘I understand, Sir.'

West Ridgeway steepled his fingers.

‘This is now a matter of such grave importance that I believe it is time fully to brief the Chief Secretary, Mr Balfour and the government. I will seek a meeting with Mr Balfour immediately.'

‘There have been certain other developments, by the way,' Mallon said.

‘Tell me.'

‘It's better that Detective Sergeant Swallow does that, Sir. He's closer to it.'

West Ridgeway looked interrogatively at Swallow.

‘Sergeant?'

‘We believe that we may have identified the person who murdered Pollock, the pawnbroker. My belief is that the murder is connected with this business. I'm just not sure how or why.'

‘Who is the person you suspect? What are your suspicions based on, Sergeant?'

‘Dr Lafeyre, the medical examiner, has provided us with significant clues in the form of finger-marks that were left at the scene. The finger-marks are those of Grace Clinton, widow of the late Arthur Clinton. She admits to having been there.'

‘Finger-marks?' Kelly said. ‘Preposterous. This is more of the bluff and flannel we get from G-Division.'

‘I don't think so,' Swallow answered. ‘We also have a confession. I think it was self-defence, but that's a matter for a court to decide.'

‘First you told us it was his sister who killed him,' Kelly said mockingly. ‘Now it's this Clinton woman. When will you make up your mind?'

‘We make up our minds when we have all the information we need, Major Kelly. That might not be a process that you're especially familiar with, but it's how we do things in G-Division.'

 

SEVENTY-TWO

‘Painting class?' Mallon asked.

Swallow and the G-Division chief had emerged from the Under-Secretary's office into the Upper Yard. ‘You're going to your painting class?'

‘It's always on Thursday afternoon. If you're agreeable, I'll be back by 5 o'clock. I thought it might be possible to get a couple of the lads at Exchange Court to execute the warrant at the Treasury Office. It's a matter of going through the files and picking up the relevant papers.'

‘I suppose so,' Mallon said. ‘You might detail Mick Feore to do it. He'd need a couple of good men with him. But he'd have a bit of diplomacy about him dealing with the civil servants down there. Check back in with my clerk when you're at finished your … painting class.'