The Eloquence of the Dead (4 page)

‘As to lunch, thank you, but no,' he told her. ‘I'll have to make do with the canteen at the Castle.'

He knew that even though Lily was under no illusions as to how he felt about her, she wanted a restoration of good relations between himself and her elder sister.

Maria had put in five years of widowhood before he had come into her life. Over time, their relationship developed. First, there was friendship, then physical intimacy. Swallow had not led a sheltered life in that respect. Twenty years as a policeman in the city had put him in the way of female comfort more often than he wanted to remember. He could still recall the perfumes of the whore-houses where he had roistered in his alcohol-fuelled student days. But with Maria it had been unlike anything he had known heretofore. He felt a part of her, drawn in completely into a union of the flesh and the spirit that he had never known before.

Soon there was talk of a future together. But when Swallow felt that Maria was pressuring him to a decision, he hesitated.

Matters had come to a head during the investigation of the Chapelizod Gate murders earlier in the year. He had unwittingly placed the two sisters in danger. Maria had been implacably angry. Against a backdrop of tension and recrimination, he had vacated his lodgings at Grant's. For more than a month now he had rented a small house at Heytesbury Street, off the South Circular Road, with his sister Harriet.

He told himself that he had stepped back, not walked away. The relationship was not dead. Maria had made no attempt to rent the room to anyone else after he left. He came to visit the bar a couple of times since then, but he made no attempt to stay. She made no effort to persuade him to do so.

For a moment, he thought that Lily was going to retaliate. Instead, she smiled coldly.

‘Maria asked if you and Harriet would be free to come to dinner on Sunday. Harry and I will be there. Maybe Harriet might like to bring a friend as well. I gather she has a widening social circle.'

He was not ready yet to engage in any serious discussion with Maria. But Sunday dinner accompanied by his sister might be as good a way as any to break the ice. Maria and Harriet got on well. He sometimes believed that Maria's relationship with his sister was warmer than it was with her own.

‘I don't expect to be working,' he said without enthusiasm. ‘So I'll be there. Please extend my thanks.'

Lily eyed Katherine. ‘You'll understand, Miss Greenberg, that Mr Swallow and my sister, Mrs Walsh, are close friends.'

The message was clear. There was to be no dallying with a man who was still in Maria's life, however tentatively. But Katherine Greenberg was not to be put down so easily. The dark eyes flashed in annoyance.

‘And you'll understand, Miss Grant, that Mr Swallow and I have known each other since my childhood.'

Lily smiled with exaggerated sweetness and turned to leave the classroom.

‘Well, Miss Greenberg, I had no idea. That must have been such a very long time ago.'

 

THREE

Although he estimated that the pawnbroker had been dead for at least a week, Dr Henry Lafeyre could say with reasonable certainty what had killed him.

‘Broken like an egg,' he told Detective Inspector ‘Duck' Boyle after a brief examination of the back of Ambrose Pollock's skull. A two-pound iron weight on the floor, stippled with dried blood, seemed a likely candidate as the murder weapon.

‘He was hit where he sat.' Lafeyre pointed to the blood-splashed papers on the desk. ‘You can see the spattering there.'

Two lengths of rope encircled the dead man's chest, fixing him to the back of the chair. The wrists were tied in front with a thin rope. Another was looped and knotted around the ankles. Anyone looking through the frosted glass from the shop would have seen Ambrose Pollock in his usual sitting position with his ledgers and account books.

Boyle was the senior officer on duty at Exchange Court when the breathless constable dispatched by Stephen Doolan turned in to make his report.

It was unwelcome news. ‘Duck' Boyle had brought the avoidance of crime work to an art form. On this occasion, he had no option but to respond. He sighed and put down the sheaf of duty rosters on which he had been happily idling.

‘Swann … Feore,' he barked at two young G-men ploughing through their own paperwork at their desks.

‘On ye'er pins. There's a murder above at Lamb Alley.'

Paradoxically, the corpulent Boyle was glad of the fresh late September air after the dankness of the detective office. G-men invariably grumbled that they were housed in the unhealthiest part of the Castle. The complaint was not unfounded, and it was reflected in a high incidence of respiratory illnesses among the detectives.

‘Duck' Boyle had earned his soubriquet from the curious, waddling gait that caused his posterior to swing from side to side as he walked. But he kept up with Swann and Feore, covering the quarter mile along Lord Edward Street and past Christ Church to Lamb Alley in what he saw as a respectable ten minutes.

Assailed by the odours from inside the pawn shop, he had waited outside for the arrival of the Medical Examiner and the police photographer.

Dr Harry Lafeyre caught the stink the moment he stepped out of his brougham carriage. He took the stopper from a small bottle of scented salts, put it to his nose and inhaled deeply. Then he handed it to Boyle.

‘Have a sniff of that, Inspector. You won't imagine you're in a rose garden, but it'll help.'

Curious onlookers had gathered from the nearby tenement houses and street stalls. Shawled women and ragged children. Idle men in worn-out clothes and old, broken boots. Any excitement was welcome in lives lived out in crowded tenements with poor nutrition and primitive sanitation. They were being kept at a distance from the entrance by half a dozen constables. Lafeyre heard his own name being spoken as someone in the crowd identified him.

Stephen Doolan met him at the door.

‘One man dead in there, Doctor. Ambrose Pollock. He's the owner. The sister who runs the place with him is gone missing. We've searched from top to bottom.'

Boyle and Doolan led him to the back office.

Even at midday, the light was dim, just sufficient for Lafeyre to take in the essentials of the scene. After a visual examination of the body, he gestured to the bloodied iron weight on the floor close to the dead man's feet.

‘That would have done the deed easily enough, without needing too much force.'

‘And light enough to be wielded by a woman,' Doolan observed. ‘But the woman isn't here. She's away, isn't she?'

He had checked for any signs of a forced entry on the ground floor. When he found none, he opened two of the windows facing into the yard in an effort to vent the odour.

Then he went through every room, moving upward floor by floor. The smell was fractionally diluted as he climbed higher, but he kept his handkerchief clamped over his nose and mouth.

The parlour on the first floor was littered with empty bottles – port, sherry, gin and whiskey. An oval table was covered with dirty plates and pots, fragments of food, bones and what might have been chicken carcasses. The smell of organic rot contested with the stench from the floor below. When he stepped into the room, a platoon of small brown creatures scurried away under the ends of the curtains.

Two rooms with peeling wallpaper on the top floor functioned as sleeping quarters. A pair of boots and a hanging tweed suit signalled that the first was used by Ambrose Pollock. An unmade bed, strewn with female clothing told Doolan that the second room was Phoebe's. There were more bottles on the floor and on the washstand.

But there was no trace of Phoebe Pollock.

When Lafeyre had finished, examiner and policemen stepped gratefully out of the office into the fresh air of the back yard.

‘She must have taken off early this morning,' Doolan said. ‘The house is clear and there's no sign of a break in. A beat man found her on the street late last night, full of drink. That's why we wanted to check out the state of things here this morning.'

‘Duck' Boyle smoothed his beard and then clasped his hands across his waistcoat.

‘I believe that I can put up what's called a hypothesis,' he said solemnly. ‘This woman done a runner. She musta' brained him for some reason unknown and then took to the drink over a number o' days.'

He paused. ‘It would be me further hypothesis – it's a Greek word be the way – that she propped him up so the clients would think he was workin' away as normal. Then she takes to orderin' in as much food and drink as she could handle until eventually she legs it outta here, knowin' that the game was up.'

‘It looks that way all right, Inspector,' Doolan said cautiously. ‘But in case it isn't an inside job, we'll need to circulate a warning around the area.'

‘That's what we'd want t'avoid,' Boyle said impatiently. ‘We don't want to be frightenin' the lives outta the citizenry. It's a simple case that a madwoman's after killin' her own brother. I hope I'm clear on that.'

Lafeyre and Doolan nodded in unison, seeking to convey their shared appreciation of Boyle's deductive capacities.

Detective Tony Swann appeared at the back door.

‘The tills are empty here in the shop. She must have taken whatever cash there was.'

Boyle smirked. ‘There y'are now. What did I tell yiz?'

‘She'd have been driven out by the stink sooner or later anyway,' Doolan said after an awkward interval. ‘I wonder why she did it. What happened between them?'

‘Should you send for a priest … or a minister?' Lafeyre inquired.

Doolan shook his head. ‘I don't believe Ambrose Pollock had any religion at all. If he did, he didn't take it very seriously. I wouldn't trouble any holy man for him.'

‘Well, you have to locate Miss Pollock one way or another. In the meantime, we'll have the photographer make a record of what's to be seen here. And I'll arrange for an ambulance to take what's left of her brother to the morgue for a post mortem.'

‘We'll notify the special posts on the railways and the sea packets in case she tries to leave the city,' Doolan said. ‘I'll get a description out on the ABC.'

The ABC police telegraph system had been installed after the Phoenix Park murders. It enabled messages to be diffused simultaneously across the city's network of more than thirty stations.

‘Yer right, Sergeant,' Boyle slapped a pudgy fist into the palm of his other hand. ‘We'll dhraw a net of steel aroun' Dublin city and in that net we'll surely catch Phoebe Pollock, the fish we want.'

 

FOUR

Swallow rinsed his brushes, and closed down his colour box. The seascape was quite dry by now, so he could put it safely in his portfolio. As he came down the staircase, making for the front entrance of the school, he found himself in step with Katherine Greenberg. He held the door for her.

‘I think I upset Miss Grant,' she said as they stepped into Thomas Street. ‘I certainly didn't intend to. Do you think I should apologise?'

Swallow snorted impatiently.

‘You needn't be so sensitive. If anything, you're the one who's due the apology. She thinks she should be protective of me. You see, I had been … how shall I put it … keeping company with her elder sister, Mrs Walsh. She's a widow. She owns a business just up the street. I had accommodation there for a time before I moved on. ‘

‘Ah, now I understand,' she laughed. ‘She's looking after her sister's interests and she saw me as some sort of a threat. You'll have to explain to her that I've known you since I was – what – ten? And anyway, a Jewish woman and a gentile policeman of a certain age wouldn't seem a likely partnership, would they?'

A certain age? That hit him. He hoped his face did not betray what he felt.

He was not that old. He was fit and active. A match for any man of her own age. Maybe more so. And she was not so very young herself at this stage.

He avoided giving an answer.

‘If you're going back to Capel Street I'll walk that way with you. I'm due back at the Castle for 2 o'clock.'

They turned into John's Lane, passing Power's model distillery. White banners of steam were rising from the ventilators of the still house. The air was sweet from the carpets of grain spread out across the drying floors. Somewhere under the scent of the grain there was the sharper tang of malt. It was said that up to 1,000 men were at work in John's Lane at any hour of the day or night.

‘You're a detective sergeant now,' she said. ‘I've seen your name in the newspapers.'

They stopped on the pavement to allow two of the distillery's drays to lumber out through high gates into the cobbled street.

‘That's right. You won't read many happy stories about me in the papers.'

‘Do you enjoy it?'

Swallow had not expected the direct question, even though it was one he found he was increasingly asking himself.

His boss at G-Division, the legendary John Mallon, had marked his career cards earlier in the year. If he stayed in G-Division he was unlikely to move beyond his present rank. His Roman Catholic religion was against him for a start. His inclination to challenge authority did not help either.

‘Go and make a decent woman of Mrs Walsh,' Mallon told him. ‘You can draw your pension and run the business with her. Or go for promotion in the uniformed ranks. Religion and politics won't block you there, at least not to the same degree.'

If he were truthful, he knew, he would say that he was boiling with rage. He worked his guts out on the job. He took risks for it. And he was better at it than most of those who had moved ahead of him in rank.

‘I don't enjoy it as much as I used to,' he told her. ‘I've been at it a long time. I won't deny it can be very satisfying when you manage put a committed criminal out of the way. But it's a hard life.'