MICHAEL RUSSELL
The City of Shadows

For Anita

I have been here before,

But when or how I cannot tell;

I know the grass beyond the door,

The sweet keen smell.

‘Sudden Light’

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One: Free State

1. The Phoenix Park

2. Merrion Square

3. Harold’s Cross

4. Stephen’s Green

5. Clanbrassil Street

6. Kilranelagh Hill

7. The Mater Hospital

8. Kilmashogue

9. The Gate

10. Red Cow Lane

11. Adelaide Road

12. Weaver’s Square

Part Two: Free City

13. Oliva Cathedral

14. Danzig-Langfuhr

15. Zoppot Pier

16. Mattenbuden Bridge

17. The Forest Opera

18. Silberhütte

19. The Westerplatte

20. The Dead Vistula

Part Three: Free Will

21. Glenmalure

22. Dorset Street

23. Westland Row

24. Baltinglass Hill

A Tale of Two Treaties

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE
Free State

Inthe back drawing-room there was a quantity of medical and electrical apparatus. From the ceiling, operated by pulleys, was a large 170 centimetre shadow less operating lamp hanging over a canvas covered object – when the cover was removed it was found to be a gynaecological chair with foot rests. The detective sergeant found a specially padded belt that could be used in conjunction with the chair. Among the objects found in the drawing-room was a sterilising case, in the drawer of which were wads of cotton wool. In the office there was a cardboard box containing a dozen contraceptives and a revolver.

The Irish Times

1. The Phoenix Park

Dublin, June 1932

The moon shone on the Liffey as it moved quietly through Dublin, towards the sea. The river was sparkling. Silver and gold flecks of light shimmered and played between the canal-like embankments of stone and concrete that squeezed it tightly into the city’s streets. By day the river was grey and sluggish, even in sunlight, darker than its sheer walls, dingier and duller than the noisy confusion of buildings that lined the Quays on either side. Its wilder origins, in the emptiness of the Wicklow Mountains, seemed long forgotten as it slid, strait-jacketed and servile, through the city it had given birth to. It wasn’t the kind of river anyone stood and looked at for long. It had neither majesty nor magic. Its spirit had been tamed, even if its city never had been. From Arran Quay to Bachelor’s Walk on one side, from Usher’s Quay to Aston Quay on the other, you walked above the river that oozed below like a great, grey drain. And if you did look at it, crossing from the Southside to the Northside, over Gratton Bridge, the Halfpenny Bridge, O’Connell Bridge, it wasn’t the Liffey itself that held your gaze, but the soft light on the horizon where it escaped its walls and found its way into the sea at last. Yet, sometimes, when the moon was low and heavy over the city, the Liffey seemed to remember the light of the moon and the stars in the mountains, and the nights when its cascading streams were the only sound.

It was three o’clock in the morning as Vincent Walsh walked west along Ormond Quay. There was still no hint of dawn in the night sky. He had no reason at all to imagine that this would be the last day of his short life of only twenty-three years. He caught the glittering moonlight on the water. He saw the Liffey every day and never noticed it, but tonight it was full of light and full of life. More than a good omen, it felt like a blessing, cutting through the darkness that weighed him down. It was a fine night and surely a fine day to come. Turning a corner he saw lights everywhere now, lighting up the fronts of buildings, strung between the lampposts along the Quays, illuminating every shop and every bar. Curtains were drawn back to show lamps and candles in the windows of every home. The night was filling up with people. The streets had been empty, even fifteen minutes ago, when he’d set off from Red Cow Lane, but suddenly there were figures in the darkness, more and more of them now, in front, behind, crossing over the bridges from south of the river, all walking in the same direction: west.

A stream of Dubliners moved along with him, flowing in the opposite direction to the Liffey, growing at every tributary junction that fed into the Quays. Men and women on their own, quiet and purposeful; couples, old and young, silent and garrulous, some holding hands like lovers and some oblivious of one another; families pushing prams and pulling stubborn toddlers, while youngsters of every age raced in and out of the throng with growing excitement. There were young men who walked in quiet, sober groups, some fingering a rosary, and others full of raucous good humour; women and girls, arm in arm in lines across the street, gossiping and giggling as eager, teasing, endless words tumbled out of their mouths. Occasionally the whole population of a side street decorated with flowers and banners erupted out to join the flow of people moving towards the Phoenix Park. Vincent Walsh glanced back to see the first pink glow behind him in the sky. The new day was coming. And it was as if everyone around him had that same thought at once, as if all those footsteps, already full of such happy anticipation, were moving even faster now, more purposefully and more exuberantly forward, to the gates that led into the Park.

The noise was suddenly much louder. Everyone was talking. The sense of being a part of it all, of belonging to it all, of being absorbed into this hopeful stream of humanity, was irresistible. It wasn’t something Vincent wanted to resist. He was fighting back tears, even as his face beamed and smiled in response to the joyful faces around him. This was how he wanted to feel; it was how, when this day ended, he knew he could never be allowed to feel. As they all poured through the Park gates together it was quiet again for a moment. Abruptly the night had opened up around them. Dublin, always so closed and crowding in on itself, was gone. There was only the rhythmic sound of thousands of feet on grass and gravel, and the sight of thousands of shadows amongst the trees of the Phoenix Park.

As full daylight came, the tramp of feet and the clamour of voices grew louder. Vincent had tried to sleep but he didn’t really want to. His heart, like everyone else’s, was beating to the sound of those feet and, like everyone else, he couldn’t tire of simply watching the arriving masses. From a stream to a torrent now, melding to form great banks and squares of humanity as far as the eye could see. By eight o’clock the cars and the coaches were coming too, from every corner of Ireland. Someone said there must be a million already, a million people there to bear witness to the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Someone said the Eucharistic Congress was the final victory for Ireland, after hundreds of years of faith in the face of persecution, flight and famine. Someone said, and at some length, that for anyone who thought there was no such thing as democracy, here was enough real democracy to right the whole shipwreck of the world. Someone said even the angels looking down from the gold bar of heaven could see them there. Someone said it was the greatest loudspeaker system the earth had ever known, stretching fifteen miles through the Park and into the city. Someone else said the angels should have no trouble hearing so. And in front of the crowd, close to where Vincent was sitting, was the high altar that would be the focus of a million devoted faces that day. It shone in the morning sunlight, radiantly white against the dark phalanxes of the faithful, with its two great arms of pillared colonnades, echoing the colonnades of St Peter’s in Rome, reaching out to hold a million people in a joyful embrace.

There was really no plan. He knew the block of seats where the priest would be giving communion. They’d talked about it, weeks before, the last time they’d been together. They had talked about everything that night, everything that mattered to them, everything they felt passionate about, everything they’d ever dreamed about. Vincent had never felt closer to anyone. He had never felt such belonging. He had never felt such an all-possessing love. The priest didn’t meet him the next day, or the next, or the next. He’d promised he’d be there, waiting in his car in Smithfield, but he didn’t come. And there’d been no more letters. But it was understandable. The Eucharistic Congress meant so much work for any priest, every priest. Today he would see him. He would be at the Pontifical Mass. The priest had been so proud, so excited about serving so close to the high altar. And Vincent would find him. It would happen. Irrespective of tickets and passes and seat allocations and stewards, it would happen. There would be a million people in the Phoenix Park, a million people full of hope. And no hope was stronger than Vincent’s. If he had had doubts as he set out in the darkness that morning, he had breathed in the intoxicating faith that was all around him now, and he had been consumed by it.

Vincent had been watching a group of stewards and workmen as they struggled to unload a trailer of heavy benches in front of the high altar. People were already being moved back from the areas reserved for the great and the good. They would have no need to arrive before dawn and stand there all morning. He spoke to the big man who was so cheerfully in charge.

‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘There’s still benches to be shifted. We can’t have the bigwigs standing up, not when they’ve brought their arses with them to sit on.’

He worked through the morning, carrying benches and chairs and lining them up in rows. He brought plants and flowers to the colonnades of the high altar. He fetched kettles of tea for the stewards and the labourers, and he picked up their litter. The more he worked, the more he let himself sink into a sense of belonging that was utterly unfamiliar to him. The Eucharistic Congress had seemed a long way from him a week ago, even though it was the only thing anybody was talking about. It filled Dublin and Ireland and the hearts and minds of everyone in it. But it had had nothing to do with him until now, except as the chink of light that offered him a way to find the man he loved. Now it felt different. He didn’t forget why he was there, not for a moment, but he hadn’t expected to be absorbed into the day like this. Suddenly it was his day too. He had contributed his sweat to it. And when the work was done and a hush of anticipation descended on the Phoenix Park, the steward he’d first spoken to slapped him on the back.

‘You may stay at the front, lad. You’ve done more than your share.’

The cavalry came first, lances held high, escorting the carriages and the cars that brought the world’s cardinals, archbishops and bishops to the high altar. They were followed by politicians and ambassadors in tails and top hats, businessmen and union leaders, and the banners of almost every society, association and club in Ireland that could come up with a halfway decent reason to be there. They were led by the graciously waving hand of Éamon de Valera. Ten years ago he had gone to war with the independent Irish state he helped wrest from British rule, because it wasn’t independent enough. Then, if some of the Irishmen he had fought beside against the British had caught him, he would have been shot. He had been excommunicated by the Church during the Civil War that followed the War of Independence, when old comrades killed one another because of the six counties that remained under British rule, and an oath to the English king that no one took any notice of, even in London. But now Dev had returned triumphantly from the political wilderness. Now he was the president of the Free State he despised.

Meanwhile a purple and crimson thread of prelates made its way through the thousands of robed priests in front of the altar. For seconds it was so quiet that the birds could be heard singing in the trees; there was the cry of a solitary gull sailing overhead. Cardinal Lauri, the Papal Legate, read the Pope’s words to the crowd. ‘Go to Ireland in my name and say to the good people assembled there that the Holy Father loves Ireland and sends to its inhabitants and visitors not the usual apostolic blessing but a very special all-embracing one.’ And as the Mass started Vincent simply walked to where he wanted to be, where he had to be. ‘Introibo ad altare deo.’ I shall go unto the altar of the Lord. He answered the Cardinal’s words with words he had not spoken in many years. ‘Ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam.’ To God who giveth joy to my youth. Once he had spoken those words as an altar boy. But slowly, painfully, not even understanding why at first, he had seen all the words he knew by heart come to feel like someone else’s. They couldn’t belong to him any more, and worse he couldn’t belong to them. But today they were his again. He held them close, like childhood friends. He hadn’t understood how much he wanted them to be his again.

There were moments in the Mass when he felt the happiness of a childhood that had been ripped away from him by his consciousness of who he was. Was it really impossible to find a way back when he could feel like this? Suddenly he realised that the time had come. The Cardinal had elevated the host that brought Christ’s presence into the life of every one of the million men, women and children now on their knees. Three thousand priests moved out into the crowd with the Eucharist. And for the first time that day, there was doubt in Vincent’s mind. He had still not seen him. He had looked and looked, hoping, believing. Only now did he feel fear, a growing fear that despite everything the priest was not there, that something had happened, that he was lost in a crowd that was a quarter of the population of Ireland.

But then he saw him, shockingly close, moving forward with the chalice, along the line of kneeling figures towards him, just as the passionate voice of John McCormack soared up from the high altar, where he stood in the red and gold and black velvet tunic of a Papal Count. ‘Panis Angelicus.’ Bread of Angels. The bread of angels becomes the bread of man. O miracle of miracles. The priest was too absorbed in what he was doing, too full of the sanctity of the moment, even to see anyone he served the host to; each kneeling form, hands clasped in prayer, each tongue protruding to take the bread of the angels. And it was almost as the priest reached him that Vincent took the note from his pocket. ‘I will wait for you after. I will wait for you. Vincent.’ He had written more at first, much more, over and over again, but each time he had thrown the note away. There would be time to say all that. And there would be ways to say it without any words. He was shaking now as the priest stood in front of him. ‘O res mirabilis!’ As the host left his lover’s hand and rested on his tongue, Vincent pushed the tightly folded note at him. The man stared down. It was a look first of nothing more than broken concentration and surprise, but it was followed by confusion, and then fear.

The kneeling figure looked up at the priest with an expression of almost beatific devotion. The moment lasted only seconds, though for both men it seemed much longer. For Vincent it was as if the million people in the Park were no longer there. For the priest it felt as if a million pairs of eyes were looking into his soul, horrified by what was there. He moved on abruptly to offer the host to the next communicant. Vincent closed his eyes in a prayer of thanks. He had seen neither the confusion nor the fear on his lover’s face. He hadn’t seen the tightly folded note, screwed instantly into an even tighter ball, fall to the ground to be trodden underfoot, unread. And as the Mass ended and a million people went in peace, Vincent Walsh simply sat and watched them go – the people, the cars, the carriages, the politicians, the priests and the prelates. He watched until the stewards and soldiers and policemen were leaving too. He watched until long after he knew that his faith in that day was not going to be fulfilled, until long after all the hope that he had shared with a million people that day had drained away.

There was darkness in the sky now. The policeman had been eyeing him on and off for over an hour. He walked towards Vincent with a look of distaste.

‘It’s time you were away from here.’

‘I was waiting for someone.’

‘I don’t see anyone left to wait for. You heard what I said. Off.’

‘He still might –’

Vincent stopped. The world he had forgotten about since the early hours of that morning, looking down at the shimmering, moonlit waters of the Liffey, the world he really lived in, the world in which he was a permanent and unwanted stranger, was there in front of him again. Even those words, ‘He still might –’, said in the way he’d said them, were enough. This guard he had never seen before already knew him. The expression of contempt and disgust was palpable, already like a punch, like the real punches that had so often come with that look in the past. It wouldn’t be the first time they had come from the police officers of the Garda Síochána.

‘If you want the shite kicked out of you, there’s a few of us would be happy enough. Are you up for that?’

Almost anything Vincent said would provoke a beating. He knew the look too well. There was a group of gardaí, smoking close by. They were watching him too. It was the same look. He got up and turned away, without another word. He walked back through the Park, back to the river, back along the Quays. Everywhere there were people. They still filled the streets, more and more of them as he got closer to the city centre, where the parades and processions had continued all afternoon. The whole place was full of people celebrating this day that had been like no other. But for Vincent Walsh it was a day like every day again; like every day had been for years.

*

He walked into Carolan’s Bar. He nodded in response to the greetings, but there was nothing behind the smile he forced out of himself. He stepped in behind the bar. For a moment Billy Donnelly said nothing. Then he picked up a bottle of Bushmills and half-filled a tumbler. He thrust it into Vincent’s hand. Billy didn’t need an explanation. Hadn’t he known the outcome?

‘What else did you expect? I told you.’

‘You’re a fecking clairvoyant, Billy.’

Vincent put the glass to his lips. He didn’t want it but he drank it.

‘Jesus wept, Vinnie. If I’d a pound for every man here was fucked by a priest and never saw him again, I’d be the richest man in Ireland!’

‘You don’t know anything about him.’

‘I’ve met his sort in every jacks in Dublin. We all have.’

‘You’re a gobshite.’

‘I am and I wouldn’t know an angel if he was up my arse. It’s why I’ll never get to heaven. Go on, forget about working tonight. Get off and see some of your pals. Or take the bottle upstairs and shout at the moon.’

‘I’ll be better doing something, even listening to a bollocks all night.’

Billy grinned. He reached for the Bushmills again and refilled the tumbler. Vincent drank it down in one. He’d the taste for it now. He turned back to the bar and grabbed one of the empty glasses thrusting towards him.

‘Another pint if that’s the sweet nothing’s all over with now!’

‘In the glass or will I pump it straight into your great, gaping gob?’

‘If that’s what’s on offer I’ll have the pint afterwards so.’

Vincent laughed with everyone else. The cramped bar at Carolan’s smelt of stale beer and sweat and cheap aftershave. Once in a blue moon Billy Donnelly decided the place had to be cleaned properly, and for the next week it smelt so strongly of Jeyes Fluid that when the smell of the stale beer, sweat and aftershave returned, it was like the breath of spring. Vincent looked around at the noisy crowd of regulars; the screeching queens with rouged cheeks; the swaggering boys always giggling too much; the big men with moustaches and muscles and paunches; the tweed-jacketed pipe smokers who jumped every time the door opened and kept their wedding rings in their pockets. It wasn’t a place you could really say you belonged, but it was safe. It shut out a world where belonging was out of the question. The Guards knew what Carolan’s was and most of the time they left it alone. But there was a price for that. They paid a visit now and again, just to drink Billy’s whiskey and to remind him and his customers they were there on sufferance. And if the Guards wanted information, they got it. A sign behind the bar read: ‘Don’t say anything, Billy’s a fucking unpaid informer’.

That night Vincent Walsh laughed a lot and kept on laughing. He kept on drinking and drank too much, and Billy Donnelly was happy to let him. There were a lot of bad things that could happen to a homosexual man. Falling in love came high on the list. The kind of love that didn’t go away the next time you had sex was the worst. You had to train yourself not to care if you wanted to survive. And behind the laughter Billy could see that Vincent believed in something no one in Carolan’s Bar had any right to believe in. Love was still burning in his eyes. It would be a long time before he let it go. Billy knew. He had been to the same place. Twenty years ago a doctor had pumped his stomach and saved his life. There were days when if he’d met that eejit of a doctor again he’d have beaten the bastard senseless.

It hadn’t been such a bad evening in the end. Carolan’s was at its loud and irreverent best. The sound of laughter and the caramel-brown anaesthetic had numbed Vincent Walsh’s head and put his heart in a box, at least till the morning. They worked hard at laughter in Carolan’s. It was the language in which everyone spoke about everything; politics and the price of bread, sex and family squabbles, memories and dreams, religion and the litter in the streets, joy, sorrow, desire, bitterness, hope, resentment, love, hatred, grief; every ordinary pleasure and irritation that life delivered. Outside they spoke another language. And it was someone else’s tongue. The last recalcitrants were pushed, cajoled and kicked out into the street. Vincent started to pick up pots. The silence was as sobering as the prospect of washing the stinking glasses and emptying out the filthy ashtrays. Billy bolted the door shut.

‘We’ll have the one we came for and let the glasses wash themselves. There won’t be a saint in heaven lifting a finger with the day that’s in it, so why the fecking hell should we?’

Vincent smiled at the comfortable predictability of the words. Every night of Billy Donnelly’s life there was a reason why it was just the wrong time to wash the pots. He had no need of high days and holidays to put off till tomorrow what he was supposed to do today. It was often well into the next afternoon before what passed for clearing up in Carolan’s got underway. If you really wanted a clean glass for a morning pint you were better off bringing your own. But as Billy went behind the bar to twist the cap off another bottle of Bushmills, Vincent carried on collecting glasses. Yes, at some point he would go upstairs to the room in the attic and force himself to go to sleep. Not yet. So Billy poured two more glasses, humming the tuneless tune to himself that always indicated no more conversation was required. Then there was a loud hammering on the front door. Billy sighed, walking across the bar with his most forbidding landlord’s scowl.

‘Now which old queen thinks we can’t get enough of her company?’

He unbolted the door and pulled it open.

‘Didn’t I tell you to piss off –’

He stopped. A tall, thin man in his forties stood in the doorway, smiling amiably. He walked in without a word, followed by three others, a little younger. Under their coats and jackets they all wore the blue shirts that marked them out as members of the Army Comrades Association, demobbed Free State soldiers and assorted hangers-on, who thought they’d knocked the bollocks out of Éamon de Valera in the Civil War, only to see him president of Ireland now. The Blueshirts modelled themselves on the Blackshirts and Brownshirts of Mussolini and Hitler, at least as far as shirts were concerned. Their political agenda hadn’t got any further than brawling with the IRA in the streets, but in the absence of IRA men to pick a fight with, and with drink taken, a bit of Blueshirt queer bashing wouldn’t have been out of the question. Didn’t they pride themselves on defending Ireland’s Catholic values above everything else? But what struck Billy Donnelly immediately was that these Blueshirts weren’t drunk, in fact they were coldly sober.

‘Now, you wouldn’t deny us a drink, Billy, not on a night when we should all be throwing our arms around each other with the holiness of it all. And when it’s starting to rain out there too.’

Billy didn’t know these men, whatever about the familiarity. He glanced back as the last one shut the door and bolted it, smiling. Billy knew that smile; he was a big man who would enjoy what he was going to do.

The older Blueshirt walked across to the bar. He picked up one of the glasses of whiskey Billy had just poured out. He sauntered back towards Vincent. Two of the others went to the bar and started to help themselves to drinks as well. They wouldn’t be sober long. The big man stayed put.

‘And you’re the bum boy. Vincent, is it?’

Vincent didn’t move. He still held a tray of glasses in his hands.

‘You’ve no business in here.’ Billy’s voice was firm. But he was puzzled. He didn’t know why this was happening. If they’d been drunk it would have been easier. He could handle drunks, even queer-bashing drunks. Nine times out of ten they wanted a drink more than they wanted the pleasure of pulping some queers. The thin-faced Blueshirt turned his attention back to Billy. He moved closer to him, pushing him backwards.

‘Were you at the Mass today, Billy?’

Billy said nothing. The man’s easy, conversational tone wouldn’t last. He knew that. He knew what was coming when the man stopped talking.

‘I hear Vincent was. Did you pray for Billy, Vincent? Because the old bugger needs all the prayers he can get. “Quia peccavi nimis cogitatione verbo, et opere: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Right?’ And with each ‘mea culpa’ he slammed his fist into Billy’s chest, forcing him back against the door. ‘Get down on your knees, Billy. Say some prayers.’

Billy was coughing. He was in pain. Vincent took a step towards him but the publican shook his head furiously, choking. The Blueshirt by the door walked over to him. He put both hands on his shoulders and pushed him down hard, till Billy had no choice but to bend his knees and kneel.

‘If we put a white surplice on you, wouldn’t we take you for an altar boy so, Billy boy?’ The thin-faced Blueshirt smiled down at him.

‘The Guards aren’t going to like –’

‘They turn a blind eye to you and your sodomite clan most of the time. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t think someone had done Dublin a favour if you were floating in the Liffey tomorrow morning. Once in a while you need to be reminded what being a queer is about. Why not now?’

Billy knew, just like Vincent earlier, that there was no reply he could give that wouldn’t provoke more violence. The older man turned to where Vincent still stood with the tray of glasses. He put down the glass of whiskey he was holding, very slowly and very deliberately. It was a simple act, but the very precision with which he placed the glass on the table was menacing.

‘You defiled the Eucharist today. Did I hear it right?’

He stretched out his hand and held Vincent’s wrist in a tight grip.

‘Is that the hand?’

‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘There was a time it would have been cut off for that. I’d do it now.’

Billy was struggling to get up off his knees, determined he would take the beating himself if there had to be one.

‘Jesus and Mary, what is it you bastards want? Get out of here!’

The Blueshirt next to Billy slammed a fist into his stomach. He collapsed on to the floor. The man’s foot came down hard on his chest.

The older Blueshirt still held Vincent’s wrist.

‘A grand day for blackmail was it then, Vincent?’

‘I told you, I don’t know what you’re fucking gabbing about!’

Suddenly the man stopped smiling. He swung Vincent against the wall, knocking the tray of glasses out of his hands. They smashed all around him as he fell to the ground. The Blueshirt bent down and dragged him back up by the throat. Vincent was bleeding. There were cuts on his face, his hands, everywhere. Spots of blood were starting to show through his shirt.

‘All I need is the letters.’

Vincent stared at him. He knew now. It made no sense, but he knew.

‘Do you understand what I’m gabbing about now, bum boy?’

He let go his throat. Vincent leant against a table to get his breath.

‘Give me the letters and we’ll be gone. That’s not so hard, is it?’

After a pause Vincent nodded. He straightened himself up. The Blueshirt smiled again. No, it wasn’t hard. He picked up the glass of whiskey he had put down so deliberately and drank it, slowly, in one go.

‘Amen!’

He turned back to Billy, still on the floor, clutching his stomach.

‘And we’ll have something for our trouble, Billy boy. Go on lads.’

The other three Blueshirts moved to the bar and started to take bottles of spirits from the shelves. They were going to clear them. The thin-faced man turned to Vincent again. He hadn’t seen Vincent’s hand tightening round the neck of a broken glass on the table beside him. Nobody had.

‘Where are they?’ demanded the man.

He didn’t see the bottle coming either, as Vincent summoned every ounce of fear and force and love in his body and pushed the splintered glass into the Blueshirt’s face. As the man cried out in pain, Vincent was already through the door that opened straight on to the stairs. The other Blueshirts, racing from behind the bar they were pillaging, were too late to stop the bolt on the inside of the staircase door shooting home. The older man was screaming now; he was momentarily blinded by the blood pouring down his face. The others wrenched at the door. It wouldn’t take long to break through it. It was just about as rotten and rickety as everything else in Carolan’s Bar.

Vincent Walsh was already at the top of the first flight of stairs. He didn’t stop. He carried on running up the narrow, twisting staircase that led to the top of the house. He pushed open the door to the tiny room that was his home. An iron-framed bed, a lopsided chest of drawers with a drawer missing, a hat stand with a few clothes, a wash basin and a jug, a paraffin stove, a pile of second-hand books. There was no lock on the door but he slammed it shut behind him and pushed the chest of drawers a few feet across the room against it. He turned to the bed and reached under the mattress. He pulled out a small bundle of letters, four blue envelopes.

He looked at the letters for a moment, unsure what to do, knowing he only had seconds to decide. He pushed them into his pocket. Then he climbed on to the bed. In the sloping roof above it was a small, square window. He pushed it open and pulled himself through, out on to the roof.

Thick cloud hung over the city and there was a steady drizzle now. The slates were wet underfoot; many of them were loose. But Carolan’s Bar was tucked tightly into the side of a more substantial Georgian building. As Vincent scrambled and slid down the roof, his fall was broken by the parapet wall next door. He climbed over it, into the lead valley on the other side. He had been here before. He had lain in that wide valley on hot summer nights sometimes, when his room was too stifling to let him sleep. He heard the angry, vengeful Blueshirts as they burst into the room above, but in the seconds before one of them appeared at the window, Vincent had run along the lead valley to the back of the Georgian house. He had disappeared.

*

It was raining heavily now. It had been for several hours. The city was silent. The day’s celebrations had gone on long into the night and they had faded away, finally, with a reluctance that wasn’t hard to understand. Tomorrow ordinary life would return. And the rain itself seemed to carry that message. Vincent Walsh was soaked to the skin. The cuts that covered his body had long since stopped bleeding and the bruises could have been worse. There were plenty of times they had been worse. But pain and fear didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had saved the letters. And in saving them he had saved the man he loved. Even if he never saw him again, even if the priest never knew about it, Vincent believed he had done something that made him worthy of the love he felt. This was the romantic notion that had grown in his head as he walked the streets of Dublin, pushing out the real world again, as it had been pushed out twenty-four hours before, walking along the Quays to the Park. Perhaps it was all his head could find to keep the truth out of his heart. He would have to leave Dublin, for a while at least, but he could come back when things had quietened down. There would always be a place to stay with Billy. He knew that. It didn’t matter. One day, one day he would meet the priest again. One day he would be able to tell him everything.

There was almost a spring in Vincent’s step as he turned the corner into the street that led through Smithfield Market to Red Cow Lane and Carolan’s. He was still wary, but it was four hours since he’d scrambled down the pub roof and made his escape. There’d be no one there now, except for the publican. He was sure they wouldn’t have hurt Billy; it was him they wanted. But he wasn’t as sure as he’d like to be. He walked more quickly. Then, as he stepped out across the echoing emptiness of Smithfield, he stopped. There was a car ahead. He recognised it immediately. Finally he knew that everything that had happened since he had set off to walk through the night to the Phoenix Park had been right. The faith he had found had been real. It was the priest’s car. He had come after all, after everything. Hadn’t there been the great procession in O’Connell Street that evening? A grand reception at the Mansion House? He had come when he could. Vincent didn’t move. He was smiling, smiling like an idiot. The car headlights blazed into his eyes. The engine started up. He was still smiling as he walked forward again. The car moved forward too, picking up speed. A puzzled frown was all that Vincent Walsh had time for as it came towards him, faster, louder. There wasn’t even time for fear before it hit him.

The rain was much heavier now. He could feel it on his face. The pain that had blasted through his whole body as the car smashed into him was there, somewhere, but it was a long way away. It was a pain in a dream that didn’t quite seem to belong to him. It was the rain on his cheek that he could feel most, running down to his lips, into his mouth. He didn’t know that his own tears were there too, mixing with the rain. He didn’t hear the car door open. He didn’t hear the footsteps coming towards him across the cobbles. His eyes opened for only a second, level with the pool of water his face was lying in. No moon shone through the heavy clouds, but inches from his eyes the water shimmered in the headlamps of the car. He registered the golden ripples spreading over that oily, muddy puddle. He felt he was struggling to wake from a deep sleep and couldn’t. All he could see was light, water and light. He didn’t even register the figure that was crouching down beside him now, cutting off that golden light. He would never register anything again.

2. Merrion Square

Dublin, December 1934

The woman was obviously preoccupied. As she stepped off the pavement to cross from Kildare Street to the Shelbourne Hotel a horn blasted at her. She stepped back abruptly. A taxi, turning in from Stephen’s Green at speed, swept past without slowing. A string of abusive words cannoned back at her in the broadest of Dublin accents. She smiled, pausing to catch her breath. Even those insults carried the flavour of a Dublin she had missed far more than she was ready to admit. She looked down Kildare Street and back to the Green. She crossed and walked on past the Shelbourne, her head up now, determination in her eyes. She was doing what she had to do. It wasn’t easy, but she wasn’t supposed to be afraid of things that weren’t easy. She wasn’t supposed to be afraid of anything. She stopped for a moment, by the entrance to the hotel, looking up. A man was leaning out of an upstairs window, where a flagpole carrying the Irish tricolour, green, white and orange, extended over the pavement. There was a second pole beside it and the man was unfurling another flag. She knew the colours even before it dropped down beside the tricolour; red, white and black, and at the centre the swastika. She glanced round, expecting other people to be surprised, but no one else had noticed. She walked on quickly. She had other things to do.

The woman was in her early twenties. She was tall. Her hair was almost black, flecked in places with red. There was a warmth about her dark skin that could almost be felt, as if it had known a fiercer sun than ever shone in Ireland, even on the best of summer days. It was a sun that certainly didn’t shine on grey and soft December days like this one.

The purpose in her step was firm and unwavering as she walked along Merrion Row. She moved to avoid a crowd of winter-pale faces, bursting noisily out from a pub. She caught the breath of beer. It was another memory, almost comforting, but she wasn’t here for comfort. She turned into Upper Merrion Street. It was quieter. The flat fronts of Georgian houses gave way to the pillared buildings of government at Leinster House. She saw the trees that marked out Merrion Square. What preoccupied her was the tall terraced house at number twenty-five, with the closed shutters and the green paint peeling from the door, and the big room at the end of the long unlit corridor where the man who smiled too much did his work. Briefly her pace slowed, but only briefly. There was no real fear in her about what she had to do. The fear was about the darkness that might lie on the other side of it.

‘She’s back, your dark-eyed acushla.’

It was the fat policeman who spoke, squeezed uncomfortably into the driver’s seat of a black Austin 10, exhaling smoke from a Sweet Afton, the last of a packet of ten he had bought just before he’d parked the car two hours earlier. They were several hundred yards along from twenty-five Merrion Square. Detective Sergeant Stefan Gillespie, sitting in the passenger seat, opened his eyes. He wasn’t tired, but closing his eyes and feigning sleep was one way to stop Dessie MacMahon talking to him. He had already taken an hour of Dessie’s problems with his innumerable in-laws; gougers and gurriers the lot of them, and all the worse in drink, which they were in a lot it seemed. But Detective Garda MacMahon was right. It was the same woman. They had watched her make the same journey yesterday. They had watched her pass the house at twenty-five Merrion Square twice before she made herself mount the steps and knock on Doctor Hugo Keller’s door. They had watched her go inside, watched her emerge fifteen minutes later, and watched her hurry away again. They knew why she was back now.

‘She was making the appointment yesterday. This’ll be it I’d say.’

Dessie drew on his last cigarette one more time. Stefan nodded, his eyes fixed on the woman. She wasn’t what he’d expected. Even yesterday she didn’t seem to fit. That was the only way he could put it. There had been nervousness and uncertainty then. That made sense. Now she had her head high. It was more than grim determination though. It was in the way she held herself. As she paused for an instant at the bottom of the steps, she tossed her hair back, sweeping it off her face. There was nothing there that said shame. He could almost feel anger in that determination. There was something more too, something like pride. They were all words that didn’t belong here, words she couldn’t have any right to, doing what she was doing. And suddenly he found himself conscious of her as a woman, elegant, tense, beautiful. He hadn’t really noticed it yesterday. He frowned. It was a squalid business and that was the end of it. He didn’t like the intrusion of feelings that challenged that simple fact. The woman went inside the house and the green door closed behind her. The smell of sweat and smoke that came from Dessie swept over Stefan Gillespie again. There was a job to do and they needed to get on with it. As he turned, Dessie was grinning.

‘Your woman’s a looker. You wouldn’t blame the feller who wanted to give her a go.’

It would have been an exaggeration to say that the fat policeman had read his sergeant’s mind. It wasn’t even close. But it was still a lot closer than Stefan was comfortable with.

‘We’ll give it a few minutes, Dessie.’

‘I need a piss first.’ Garda MacMahon opened the car door and squeezed out, dropping his cigarette end in the gutter with the other nine. He walked quickly through a gate into the square, in search of a concealing tree. Sergeant Gillespie got out of the car himself and took a welcome breath of air. He was taller than his colleague and thinner, quite a lot thinner, and where Dessie was balding he had a mop of thick, brown hair that was shapeless rather than long, as if he didn’t remember to get it cut very often, which he didn’t. He looked younger than his twenty-eight years and people often assumed he was the garda rather than the sergeant. He put on his hat. It was colder than he’d thought. He stood looking towards the house. The dark-skinned woman was making him uneasy. It wasn’t a job he’d feel good about at the best of times, but it was more than that. He felt like getting back into the Austin and driving away. He pushed the thought from his mind. At least he wouldn’t have to sit there all afternoon with Dessie and his family rows and the smoke from another packet of Sweet Afton. Detective Garda MacMahon came back from the square, still buttoning up his fly.

The two policemen walked to the house. Stefan mounted the steps and rapped on the door. After a moment, he knocked again. It opened a crack. A middle-aged woman in spotless nurse’s uniform looked out at him.

‘Yes?’ It was supposed to be a question, but as yesses go it meant something much more like ‘no’.

‘We’d like to speak to Mr Keller.’ He took off his hat.

‘He’s not in just now.’

‘We can wait.’

‘He’s not here. And he sees no one without an appointment.’

‘Then I’d like to make an appointment. Now would be fine.’

Detective Sergeant Gillespie took his warrant card from his pocket and held it up. The woman’s first instinct was to slam the door in his face, but Dessie MacMahon had anticipated her. With surprising speed for his size he moved forward, past his sergeant, and put a foot and a portion of his not inconsiderable torso against the fast-closing door. He applied his weight in the opposite direction to the nurse, pushing her and the door firmly back into the hall. He had slammed her against the wall quite hard, but even as the two policemen walked into the house she had recovered her breath sufficiently for her furious and now panicking voice to fill the echoing hallway.

‘Hugo! Doctor Keller!’

‘You think he might be back then?’ said Dessie, grinning.

A door at the far end of the long hall opened. A small, rather avuncular man stood with the light behind him, peering through the thick lenses of his glasses as if he couldn’t really make out who was there. But if there was concern beneath that puzzled look it was well hidden. There was already a half smile on his face, even as Detective Sergeant Gillespie started to walk towards him. He knew what the two men were. He had absorbed that information and accepted it. He was not a man who bothered about the inevitable. He didn’t move as the detective approached him; instead his smile broadened. Stefan had only seen Keller at a distance before, going in and out of the house. He was always well dressed; today was no exception. Even though he was in shirtsleeves, the shirt was gleaming white; the yellow bow tie was perfectly tied; the braces had a floral pattern that was bright, almost loud, yet expensively tasteful; the suit trousers had knife-sharp creases; and his black shoes were spotlessly clean. By now Keller’s benign smile was irritating the detective. It was altogether too pleasant to be anything other than extremely unpleasant. Wherever it came from the effect was to make him want to wipe the smile off the man’s face with his fist. But even as that thought flashed through his mind he had an unsettling picture of Keller getting up from the floor and wiping the blood from his mouth, with the smile still there, broader and more unctuous than ever.

‘Hugo Keller,’ said Stefan flatly.

‘Doctor Keller.’ The German accent was stronger than he had expected. But he knew German accents. Austria, probably Vienna.

‘It’s Mr Keller I think.’

‘My doctorate is from the University of Graz. You may not know it, but it’s the second oldest university in Austria. Doctor Keller is correct.’

‘In Wien hat jeder streunende Hund ein Doktorat, aber sie sind noch immer Hunde, nicht Ärzte, Herr Keller.’ He stressed ‘Herr’. It was true. In Vienna every dog in the streets had a doctorate in something. They were still dogs, not doctors. The smile wavered on Keller’s lips. This wasn’t quite the Dublin detective he had anticipated. Contempt might not be so wise.

‘I am Detective Sergeant Gillespie. I will be conducting a search of your premises. I believe you have instruments here that have been used to procure miscarriages, contrary to Section 58 of the Offences against the Persons Act, and I believe you are, even now, engaged in procuring a miscarriage for a woman. You will be taken into custody, Mr Keller.’

‘Naturally, Sergeant. I’ll get my jacket.’

He turned back into the room. Stefan followed. He passed an open door on his right, a small office full of books and files. He paused, looking in, registering it. The nurse had composed herself now. She brushed back her hair and walked past him into the office. Unlike her employer the look on her face was familiar; it was fear. He watched her as she sat at the desk.

‘Please don’t try to leave,’ he said quietly.

‘Why should I?’ Despite the fear, this was her territory.

He carried on into the back drawing room of the house. It was a startling change after the dark corridor, with its stained wallpaper and blackened ceiling. The room was bright and clean and looked as if it had been transported there directly from an expensive private clinic. But while Stefan took this in his attention was fixed on the dark-haired woman he had watched enter the house. She stood in the window, framed by the sunlight that had momentarily broken through the grey December clouds. It shone through her hair in a gauze-like haze. For a second the startling brightness made him blink. And then it was gone. She was looking straight at him. Now, more closely, he saw there was indeed neither fear nor shame in her dark eyes. There was anger, and it seemed to be directed at him.

‘If you’d wait in the hall, Mr Keller.’ He didn’t look round.

‘I’m sorry, my dear.’ Keller smiled a slightly different smile at the woman. It was kinder and more reassuring than the one he had for Garda sergeants. He picked up his jacket from the back of a chair and pulled it on. ‘I don’t know if you heard any of that, outside in the hall. This gentleman is a policeman, a detective. My advice would be to say nothing, but that’s entirely up to you of course. You need offer no explanation for why you are in this room, as he well knows.’ He walked to the door. There was a mirror on the wall and he stopped to straighten his bow tie. Stefan Gillespie hardly noticed him go out. His eyes were still on the woman at the window.

‘Can you tell me who you are, Miss?’

She shook her head, but only in irritable and frustrated disbelief.

‘You couldn’t have done this on another day, could you?’

He just looked. Nothing at all about this woman was right.

‘How long has this man been doing this, procuring miscarriages, whatever it is you call it? How many years? It’s just what I needed, you and your great policeman’s boots stomping in before I’d even got started!’

‘I need your name. I’m sure you know why I’m here.’

The woman gazed at him and shook her head again. All at once the anger was gone. He saw something else in her eyes now. It was a mixture of contempt and suspicion. She looked at him as if he was the one in the wrong.

‘No, I don’t know why you’re here. I think I’ll reserve my judgement on that, Sergeant. In the meantime I shall take Mr Keller’s advice about keeping my mouth shut. You may be his best friend. So I shall say nothing.’

*

Pearse Street Garda station was the main police station for the South City, built for the old Dublin Metropolitan Police in 1915, the year before Padraig Pearse was executed after the Easter Rising, when the road was still Great Brunswick Street. It took up the corner of Townsend Street, looking towards Trinity College, a grey, austere building that echoed the Scottish-castle style of architecture popular with insurance companies, all chiselled stone and mullioned windows. The DMP was only a memory now, except for two small corbels supporting the arch over the main entrance; the sour faces of a DMP officer and a helmeted constable still looked down in disapproval. As stations went it wasn’t a bad place to work. The offices upstairs were brighter and cleaner than most of Dublin’s Garda stations, but downstairs the cells smelt like they always smelt – of stale sweat and urine and tobacco.

Stefan Gillespie sat in a room on the ground floor, close enough to the stairs for the odour of the cells to hover in the air. A bare table separated him from the dark-haired woman. The room was bare too, lit by a naked bulb. There was a window high in one wall, no more than a foot square, the glass painted over with the remains of what once must have been whitewash. She had still given him no information and no explanation. She denied nothing, admitted nothing, said nothing. He didn’t even know her name. She returned his gaze with quiet self-assurance. He was the one who kept looking away to scribble something he didn’t need to scribble on the sheet of white paper in front of him. She was beginning to make him feel she was the one running this.

‘You’re from Dublin, thereabouts anyway. The leafier parts I’d say.’

She didn’t answer.

‘You’ve clearly been out of the country though.’

‘An accent and a suntan, I can see you’re nobody’s fool.’

She didn’t need to smile to make him feel foolish.

‘Do you realise how much trouble you’re in?’

‘As a matter of fact I don’t.’

‘I can see you’re an intelligent woman. You’re not what I expected.’

He knew those last words were another mistake.

‘You were expecting some sort of idiot, were you?’

‘That’s not what I meant. ’

‘Idiot enough to be pregnant. Well, how idiotic can a woman get?’

‘Sooner or later you’re going to tell me who you are. You know that as well as I do. The only thing that can help you in this situation is to cooperate with us as fully as possible. It’s Mr Keller we want, not you.’

‘I’m sure even he knows you’ve got him. What do you need me for?’

She reached across to the packet of cigarettes on the table. They were Stefan’s. She hesitated, looking at him. He shrugged. She took one and put it between her lips. He pulled the lighter out from his pocket and flicked it, then stretched over and lit the cigarette with what he hoped was an appropriately reassuring smile. But if he thought the woman’s silence was about to end with this small act of human contact he was mistaken.

‘Thank you.’

She drew on the cigarette, then shook her head.

‘I can’t do what I went there to do. And that’s your fault. I’m not sure where that leaves me. Well, apart from being stuck here in a police station with you. That’s all I’ve got suddenly. I want to see what happens next.’

‘What happens? This is about a life, a life that would have ended this afternoon. It’s about God knows how many other lives that have ended in that back room.’ He was speaking the words he was supposed to speak now, but he knew they didn’t sound like his own. He knew too that this clever, unfathomable woman would understand that immediately. And she did.

‘Yes, it is about a life. I know that already. I wish I didn’t.’

Stefan saw something else in the woman’s face now. It was sadness, a deep and uncertain sadness. He also saw that it had nothing at all to do with why they were here. Whatever she was talking about it wasn’t the conversation he had just felt obliged to start. The interview was still going nowhere. He was not controlling this. She was. The words ‘stuck-up bitch’ were in his head. He’d had enough. He got up, pushing the cigarettes at her.

‘I’ll leave you the fags. It’ll be a long night.’ He went. Let her stew.

As he left the room he found himself smiling unexpectedly. He remembered another time he had walked away from a conversation with a woman and thought the same thing – ‘stuck-up bitch’. It was nearly six years ago. A pub in Nassau Street. Maeve. Seven months later he’d married her. And now she had been dead for nearly two years. One year, nine months, eight days. He had thought about that night in Nassau Street a thousand times in those months, waking and sleeping. He had relived it as he had relived every moment of their lives together. But he had never smiled about it in quite the same way before. It wasn’t that the woman from Merrion Square reminded him of Maeve. Perhaps she reminded him of something about himself he had forgotten. Instead of feeling angry she made him want to laugh. These thoughts came at him out of nowhere. He pushed them away. He saw Dessie MacMahon walking towards him, with a bacon sandwich and a mug of tea.

‘Has Keller phoned his solicitor?’ he asked.

Dessie nodded, taking a bite of the sandwich.

‘But he’s still not saying anything?’

‘No. He’s very polite about it though.’

‘Is the solicitor on his way?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘Stick him in a cell for the night and see how polite he is about that.’

Garda MacMahon took another bite of the sandwich.

‘What about the nurse?’ said Stefan.

‘She’s still giving out, but it’s the same story. Nothing to say.’

‘The evidence is all in Merrion Square. I don’t understand how Keller thinks he can explain that away by keeping his mouth shut and grinning.’

‘Do we give him another go, Sarge?’

‘No, I’ve had enough. Just lock the three of them up for the night.’

He wasn’t sure that would wipe away Hugo Keller’s smile. It looked like it was painted on. He was too cocky. He seemed to think he was untouchable. The nurse would keep insisting that she was just a nurse. He didn’t believe her, but Sheila Hogan was hard. She wouldn’t talk till there was something in it for her. The dark-haired woman was different. She had no place in this. Twelve hours in a police cell might bring her to her senses.

It was dark in Merrion Square as Detective Sergeant Gillespie approached the house again, but it looked brighter now than it had in daylight. The shutters were open and all the lights were on. The front door was open too and a uniformed guard stood on the steps. Stefan smiled a greeting.

‘How’s it going, Liam?’

‘Great, I can never get enough of standing around in the fecking cold.’

Stefan went in and moved down the hall to the back drawing room. A man in his late fifties was sitting on the edge of the couch, writing notes. Edward Wayland-Smith was the State Pathologist. He was tall, overweight, bearded, dressed in tweeds that made him look like he had just been blasting pheasants with a shotgun or pulling fish from a stream with a rod and flies. There was a silver-fresh salmon in the boot of his car to say he had been.

‘He’s certainly got some extraordinary equipment here. You wouldn’t find better in any hospital in Ireland. Well, in most hospitals you’d be grateful to find anything at all.’ He continued to write as he spoke, not looking up. ‘Nota bene!’ he announced, finally raising his eyes.

‘Suspended from the ceiling a 170 centimetre shadowless operating lamp. You also see a state-of-the-art gynaecological chair; German, almost brand new I’d say, with some very clever modifications. There’s a well-equipped workshop in the cellar too. It looks like your man Keller was making his own equipment, or at least improving on what he’d got. Ingenious, some of it. He must be rather bright, certainly not your average backstreet abortionist. There’s also an X-ray transformer of very high quality. I haven’t seen one like it in Ireland. It’s a modification of another continental piece of apparatus. I’ve made a full inventory, which I will have typed up tomorrow. You have looked at the office I assume, Sergeant?’

Stefan nodded. ‘I’d like you to make a note of the books.’

‘It’s done.’ Wayland-Smith got up and walked out to the hall, turning back the pages of his notebook as he did. He went into the office. He stood beside a bookcase, scanning his notes, then pointing at some of the books.

‘They are mostly standard medical texts, nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘Except that Mr Keller was a quack posing as a doctor.’

‘Well, I’ve encountered no shortage of highly qualified colleagues I’d describe as quacks posing as doctors. It’s unfortunate that there seems to be no law against that. In several books you’ll see sections on abortion and miscarriage have been marked and quite heavily annotated. I’ve recorded those. There are also a number of books dealing very explicitly with sex, in ways that might shock even a policeman, some in German that would not be readily available on our island of saints and scholars, and would normally be sent back whence they came with much sprinkling of holy water. It seems clear Mr Keller was handling a lot of what the profession likes to refer to, in a hushed whisper, as “women’s complaints”. Again it’s not your run-of-the-mill abortionist. He certainly had no problems writing prescriptions that were acceptable in any chemist in Dublin. A Merrion Square address never fails to impress. There are very detailed financial records, almost proof in itself that the man is not a real doctor. Never any names though. All very discreet. And all very expensive from the look of it. He was certainly earning more than I do. Oh, and there’s a revolver too. German, I think’

‘It is. I’ve seen it,’ replied Stefan.

‘And a box of contraceptives, also German.’ Wayland-Smith smiled.

‘Yes, Dessie’s recorded all that.’

‘Splendid! You’ll have the opportunity to prosecute the man simultaneously for the provision of contraceptives and for attempting to deal with the consequences of not using them in the first place. Good stuff, eh?’

‘You don’t like this very much.’

‘I don’t like the state asking me to count contraceptives for a living, no. But then I don’t like what Mr Keller does very much either. Who does? However, as a doctor I have always found it gratifyingly simple that virtually all of my patients are dead. Nothing to like or dislike. And that brings me to an observation about the cellar. Have you been down there?’

Stefan shook his head.

‘Dessie took a quick look. More medical equipment.’

‘There is also an unusually large stove. I’m not an expert on plumbing, as several plumbers I’ve been fleeced by will testify, but a cursory glance suggests it isn’t connected to the heating system. I would say the stove is more than adequate for disposing of whatever it was that Mr Keller may have found it necessary to dispose of in the course of his work.’

Sergeant Gillespie stepped into the black hole that was the stairway down to the cellar. He fumbled for a light switch. There was a dim glow over the stairs as he walked down into the darkness beneath the house. At the bottom of the stairs he found another switch. This illuminated the whole cellar more brightly. He saw a workbench and rows of carefully ordered tools, neatly stacked boxes of screws and bolts, coils of wire and electrical hardware, medical equipment in various states of repair. It was a place of strange calmness and order. Beyond the workbench, through a brick arch, was the cast-iron stove Wayland-Smith had seen. Stefan approached it through the arch. Coal was heaped up on one side, carefully stacked timber on the other. He could feel the heat from the stove now. He picked up a cloth that lay on the ground and opened the door, letting go of the handle sharply as the heat reached his hand. The stove was blazing fiercely, so much so that he had to step back. He turned, hearing someone on the stairs. Dessie MacMahon, flushed and sweating, was roaring down at a speed that was rarely seen.

‘I don’t know when I last saw you run. Confessions all round?’

The fat detective was still struggling to get his breath.

‘I wouldn’t want you risking your life for less,’ laughed Stefan.

‘They’re gone.’

‘Who’s gone?’

‘Two fellers from Special Branch walked into the station half an hour ago, asking about Keller. Seán Óg Moran, you’d know him, an arse-licker who’d crack his mammy’s skull if someone told him. And a sergeant called Lynch. I’ve maybe seen him, but I’d know the smell anyway. He’ll have a trench coat in the car. Straight out of the IRA and into the Branch.’

‘I know Jimmy Lynch. You’re right. A flying column man. If there was a landowner to shoot he’d have sulked for a week if he didn’t do it.’

‘First thing I heard they were in with Inspector Donaldson and there’s shouting and bollocking going on. But it’s your man Lynch doing the bollocking. Next thing they’re going out of the station with Keller and the nurse and the woman in tow. I asked them what they were doing. And I told this Lynch you weren’t going to like it. He said you could fuck yourself.’

‘A way with words too. But what the hell is it to Special Branch?’

‘They took them off in a car.’

‘What about Inspector Donaldson?’

‘I don’t know what your man Lynch told him, Sarge, but the words head and arse were in there somewhere. After that the inspector said the case was closed. Forget it. It’s out of our hands. Then he went back in his office and shut the door. I’d say he’ll still be in there with the holy water.’

‘Did he ask for any paperwork?’ Dessie shook his head. ‘Course he didn’t,’ continued Stefan with a shrug. ‘If Special Branch dumped a body on his desk and told him to have it in court on a drunk and disorderly the next morning he’d only stand up and salute. Did Hugo Keller say anything?’

‘No, but I reckon the cute hoor looked happy enough.’

‘And not exactly surprised. He never expected to stay locked up.’

The thought hadn’t occurred to Dessie before, but Stefan was right.

‘What about the woman?’

‘She did say something, when she was going out the door. “I told Sergeant Gillespie I wanted to see what happened next.” Are we the only ones not in on this, Sarge? The Branch? What the fuck is going on here?’

Stefan didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but he’d find out.

Inspector James Donaldson was a small, precise man who wore thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes look disconcertingly bigger than they were. He disliked disorder. He also disliked detectives. Quite apart from the fact that they were rude, ill-disciplined, sloppy, generally drank too much, and had the ability to turn the word ‘sir’ into an insult, they were the ones who were guaranteed to bring disorder into his police station. They thrived on the chaos he hated. And there were times when Stefan Gillespie or Dessie MacMahon knocked on his door that he had to resist an overwhelming urge to turn the key in the lock and pretend he wasn’t there. Normally Inspector Donaldson sought refuge from the disorder that went with being a policeman in his faith. He attended Mass every day at the Pro-Cathedral at eleven o’clock, and when he returned to Pearse Street Garda station, with the incense still in his nostrils, he had just enough spiritual calm to get him through the rest of the day. But the events of this particular day meant that he had little calm left. If it wasn’t enough to have his own detectives treating him like an eejit he now had detectives walking in off the street, pulling criminals out of his cells and telling him, in front of his own men, that if he didn’t like it he could stick his bald head up his arse. And they were from Special Branch too. Those fellers were a law unto themselves. They were supposed to protect the state from the people who wanted to destroy it. That was mostly the IRA of course, but these days you were hard pressed to tell whether a Special Branch man had worked with Michael Collins and his crowd bumping off British agents during the War of Independence, or with the anti-Treaty IRA bumping off Free State soldiers and policemen during the Civil War. What was guaranteed was that they’d done their share of bumping off somewhere along the line. They were thieves set to catch thieves after all. You didn’t want to cross them. They did what they liked.

The raid on Hugo Keller’s abortion clinic had been a rare thing at Pearse Street, an operation instigated by Inspector Donaldson himself. He was the one who had gathered the first intelligence. Well almost. The facts had been presented to him at a Knights of St Columbanus meeting, and as treasurer he had no choice but to act. It never occurred to him that there was a reason the so-called Doctor Keller could operate with apparent disregard for the laws of the land, among the real doctors and consultants in Merrion Square. A blind eye was being turned at a much higher level than James Donaldson. Now, for his pains, he had not only been humiliated by a Special Branch sergeant, his own CID sergeant was standing in front of him, berating him because Special Branch had just walked off with the prisoners.

‘Why didn’t you kick the bastards out?’

‘I wasn’t in a position to, Sergeant,’ replied Donaldson defensively.

‘We hadn’t even put a case together. You were the one who pushed for this. You ordered the raid. Then you let Keller waltz out of here.’

‘It’s not in our hands any more. Special Branch will deal with it.’

‘How is inducing miscarriages anything to do with Special Branch?’

‘That’s not my business. Or yours.’

‘Keller knew.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The expression on his face. When we walked into the surgery. When he sat in the cell and didn’t say anything. When he phoned his solicitor. Who didn’t bother to turn up. I’ll bet he made the call to Special Branch though.’

‘It’s clear there are other issues here, Sergeant. Quite possibly issues of state security. We can’t expect Special Branch to reveal that sort of thing.’

‘That sort of thing my arse, sir.’ There it was, that ‘sir’.

‘That’s enough, Gillespie. I’m not happy about this either. They were extremely heavy handed. I don’t like it any more than you do, but it’s done.’

‘And what about the woman?’

‘They took her too. There’s no more to say.’ Donaldson wanted Gillespie to get out now. He had had enough. But Stefan wouldn’t let go.

‘I don’t know what was up with that one. There was something. And it didn’t have anything to do with being in Keller’s clinic for an abortion.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. Leave it alone!’

Stefan had no idea what he was talking about either. He was angry about what had happened for all sorts of reasons. Somewhere it wasn’t much more than territorial. He’d been pissed on and he didn’t like it. He knew how Special Branch detectives loved to throw their weight around. But why was he so wound up? It was Donaldson who had insisted on the raid. Now it was someone else’s problem. What did it matter? It was the woman. She mattered. He didn’t know why, but she was still there, still in his head.

The telephone on Inspector Donaldson’s desk rang. He picked it up.

‘What does she want? What? All right, I’ll talk to her.’ The inspector put on a smile as he waited a moment. ‘Hello, Reverend Mother, how are –’

The cheerful greeting was cut off abruptly, and it was clear that what he was listening to was a tirade. He tried to speak several times but the words barely escaped from his mouth before they were cut off. ‘She was here –’ ‘The case is no longer –’ ‘I gave no instructions –’ ‘I didn’t know –’

Stefan turned away. It was probably the right time to make his exit.

‘Stay here!’ Donaldson hissed after him.

He stopped and turned back to the desk. The inspector glared.

‘I’ll send Detective Sergeant Gillespie across right now!’ He slammed down the phone. It wasn’t over yet. It was always the damned detectives.

‘That was the Mother Superior at the Convent of the Good Shepherd. This woman, the one having the – the one at Merrion Square.’ Abortion was not a word Donaldson found easy to say. ‘Those bollockses from Special Branch dumped her over there. Now the Reverend Mother is blaming me for it. Well, why wouldn’t she? The only name the woman knows is yours. So it all comes back here, straight back on to my desk as usual, Gillespie!’

‘What did they take her there for?’ said Stefan, puzzled.

‘The woman’s pregnant, isn’t she? And I assume she’s not married!’

‘How do I know, she didn’t even give us a name!’

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s not our business any more.’ Donaldson changed tack abruptly. He was about to give every good reason why the woman should have gone to the convent. Wasn’t it where the police took women like that? ‘I don’t know what’s wrong, but the Reverend Mother wants her out of the place. She’s beside herself. And she thinks I’m responsible. You brought the woman in here, Sergeant. You go and sort this bloody mess out!’

3. Harold’s Cross

The Convent of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd lay south of the Grand Canal in Harold’s Cross Road, behind high walls. As Stefan Gillespie drove in through the black gates, two nuns closed and bolted them shut, then disappeared into the night. The house was Georgian. Once it stood in its own park; an avenue of fifty chestnut trees lined the drive. The park was gone now. The trees came down; roads and houses had spread out where the lawns and shrubberies had been; and when the nuns came, the walls went up. Low brick buildings, almost windowless, extended out from the old house to the back and sides now, shutting it in. But the great windows still filled the front, looking out over the cobbles to the gates. They were all dark now. The only light came from the front door where another nun waited for Stefan.

As he walked towards her, the small, neat woman looked at him accusingly. ‘Reverend Mother is waiting for you.’ She turned abruptly. He followed her in. His footsteps echoed loudly on the tiled floor of the dimly lit hall. What light there was came from two small table lamps. An elaborate glass chandelier hung from the high ceiling, but it carried neither candles nor bulbs; it was never used. An oak staircase led up from the centre of the hall to a galleried landing and darkness. Darkness and silence. There was a faint smell, not altogether unpleasant. It reminded Stefan unaccountably of one of his grandmothers. His eyes were drawn to the floor, polished so ferociously that it was the only part of the entrance hall that really reflected any light. It wasn’t only praying that kept the women on their knees here.

The nun led him through a door behind the great staircase. Beneath her long skirts, reaching almost to the ground, he could see her black shoes, shining like the floor, oddly similar to a pair of regulation issue Garda boots. Yet while his footsteps filled the silence of the place, the nun made no sound at all. He smiled. If he hadn’t seen those polished boots he would have been tempted to consider the possibility that she was on wheels. A long corridor stretched ahead, still only dimly lit. On either side were doors, evenly spaced, firmly closed, each one bearing a number in Roman numerals. The smell was stronger now, and more unpleasant. At the end of the corridor the nun took a key that hung from her robes, beside her rosary, and unlocked a heavy door that led outside. She held it for him as he walked through, back into the cold night, though it felt barely colder than the house they had left.

There was a courtyard with high wooden gates. Across the courtyard was a long, low, factory-like building. The windows were more brightly lit here and where they were open there was steam billowing out into the frosty air. Stefan could hear the sound of women, shouting and laughing. The nun quickened her pace and led him inside. They were in a laundry. Women of all ages were working, some barely in their teens, some in their twenties, others middle-aged and older. They all wore the same grey, smock-like dresses. They were washing, starching, wringing, hanging up clothes, ironing, folding, packing clean linen into wicker baskets. The smell that had seemed like a pleasant childhood memory in the convent’s entrance hall was overwhelming now and almost made him retch. Soap, endless quantities of pungent, fatty soap, mixed with starch and steam and laundry water rank with the human body’s odours. This was not a place many men saw the inside of, but he was a policeman. He knew who these women were. Unwed pregnancy was not on the statute books as a crime in the Free State but every one of them was serving a sentence. As for the babies they’d borne there, those that survived were long gone, sent away for adoption or to industrial schools, with no knowledge of where they came from. He had never been past the hallway of the convent before, but as a guard in uniform he had brought girls here often enough; sometimes from a courtroom, sometimes straight from a police cell, because there was nowhere else to take them.

As he followed the nun the length of the building, he was assailed by whistles and shouted propositions. Black-robed nuns appeared as if from nowhere to discipline the laughing women. By the time he reached the end of the laundry, order had been restored. The nun brought him into an office where the Mother Superior stood, fingering her rosary beads with a ferocity that had nothing whatsoever to do with prayer. Two startlingly large sisters, who wouldn’t have disgraced a rugby front row, stood shoulder to shoulder before a closed door on the far side of the room. Mother Eustacia looked at Detective Sergeant Gillespie with profound irritation.

‘Are you responsible for this?’

‘Responsible for what, Reverend Mother?’

‘I see, you’re a fool as well as an incompetent.’

‘I understand there’s been a mistake.’

‘Yes, a mistake. You do know this woman isn’t pregnant at all?’

He was thrown by this unlikely non-sequitur.

‘The reason she was in custody –’

She cut him off.

‘We haven’t been able to examine her. We did try. I have a nun in the infirmary now as a result of the subsequent assault. However, she seems as aggressively confident about her condition in that respect as she does about everything else. I am, therefore, inclined to believe the woman.’

He was still puzzled. It didn’t make much sense of soliciting a miscarriage from Hugo Keller, let alone getting arrested for doing it.

‘Why did you bring her here, Sergeant?’

‘I didn’t bring her here, Reverend Mother.’

‘I don’t care which clown drove the car! She gave your name.’

‘As far as I know she was brought to the convent by Special Branch. A Sergeant Lynch I think. Or maybe someone else. They’ve got so many incompetent fools there it’s hard to pin them down. Women’s welfare isn’t their usual line of work, although they do specialise in dirty laundry.’

She looked at him, tightening her lips.

‘You’ll keep a civil tongue, Sergeant. Just get her out of here!’

‘Did she tell you who she is?’

‘Yes, Sergeant, she certainly did. And what she is!’

The Mother Superior offered no explanation and he could see that she wasn’t about to enlighten him. She nodded at the two nuns who were standing guard in front of the closed door. One of them opened it. In the small, cell-like room beyond the woman from Keller’s clinic sat on the edge of a table, smoking a cigarette. Her hair was dishevelled. Her clothes were torn in several places. She stood up and walked out into the office. Stefan could see that there was a bruise on her face. As she passed them the guardian nuns, despite their size, looked distinctly uncomfortable. It wasn’t physical fear. It was as if her proximity threatened them in some almost spiritual sense. The woman smiled with the insolent confidence she had shown when he was trying to question her at Pearse Street Garda station.

‘Do you know what she is?’ said the Mother Superior darkly.

‘What … she is?’

‘A Jewess, Sergeant!’

Mother Eustacia spoke the word as if she was still struggling to believe it. Stefan was unsure what would be an appropriate reply. He was mildly surprised; simply because it was information he had no reason to know. He glanced from the Reverend Mother, who was staring at him with wide-eyed indignation, to the woman, who was smiling. She seemed to be enjoying this. The look in her eyes made him want to laugh.

‘Well, in that case it’s even more of a mistake, Reverend Mother.’

The woman moved closer to him, drawing on the cigarette.

‘I’m glad they sent you, Sergeant. I didn’t like the other two.’

‘Did they do that?’

She wasn’t sure what he meant. Then she glanced down at herself, realising what he was looking at. She laughed.

‘Oh no, the sisters tried to give me a vaginal examination.’

The two big nuns gasped and then both crossed themselves. Stefan was startled, not so much by the words as by the matter-of-fact tone. Well, it was no more than a description of what had happened after all. But it wasn’t how a woman should speak, not anywhere, let alone here. The Reverend Mother pinched her lips more tightly.

‘You won’t shock me, young lady. I’ve known too much of the foulness of the human heart to be shocked by anything you can say.’

‘I’m sure. From what I’ve seen, you’ll be quite the expert.’

Mother Eustacia processed ahead of Sergeant Gillespie and the woman, with the small nun on wheels beside her, back through the laundry. Work continued all around as they walked, but the eyes of every one of the grey-clad laundry workers followed the figure of the woman. Her hair was still a mess; her clothes were torn; her face was bruised. But she walked with her head upright, her dark skin still somehow reflecting the warmth of a sun that would never find its way in through these windows. As they approached the door to the courtyard the small nun who had brought Stefan in scurried ahead to unlock it. The Reverend Mother turned to the woman. Her anger and indignation were undiminished. The very way this woman carried herself was another insult. But there was one weapon Mother Eustacia had left that would put her firmly where she belonged. She fixed her eyes on the woman, and with a look of almost infinite compassion she prayed for her.

‘Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness, hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness.’

‘I’m afraid I prefer my darkness to your light.’ The woman looked back at the laundry, at the pasty-faced girls and women, still working, but all watching her so intently. ‘You evil old bitch.’

Mother Eustacia slapped the woman hard across her face, with all the irritation, anger and humiliation she had felt welling up within her. But the woman barely blinked. She laughed as if the Mother Superior had just handed her a victory she hadn’t realised she even wanted. And there wasn’t a split second between that laugh and the sound of her hand striking the Reverend Mother’s face in return, quite as hard and quite as full of anger. There was complete silence in the laundry. No one spoke. Work had stopped. Every eye in the laundry was on Mother Eustacia, though the Reverend Mother seemed unaware of anyone else now. In her long years as the mother of this convent she had slapped many, many women, but no one had ever dared to hit her back. She turned slowly towards Stefan.

‘What are you going to do, Sergeant?’

‘I’m going to do what you told me, Reverend Mother. I’m going to get her out of here. As requested. For the rest, I think I’d call it quits.’

He grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her away. The nun on wheels was holding the door to the courtyard open, bog-eyed and fearful as she still stared at her Mother Superior. No one else moved. Then there was a sound. It was a clap. It was followed by another clap, and then another. Then there were more. The sound of slow clapping, from every girl and woman in the laundry, filled the building. The nuns turned back to their charges, shouting at them to stop. But they kept on. The Reverend Mother walked slowly back towards the office, as if she didn’t hear the noise at all. The women’s clapping grew even louder now. They would suffer for it, of course; but it would be worth it. Nothing would erase this moment.

As Stefan drove out of the convent and the high gates closed behind them, the woman brushed her hair back from her face. She looked at him, smiling, as if this sort of thing happened every day.

‘So, am I under arrest?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I’m glad you know what you’re doing.’

‘What I want to know is what you’re doing.’

‘I’m not sure any more. I thought –’

She stopped. For the first time he felt her mask slipping.

‘Do you know what happened to Hugo Keller?’ asked Stefan.

‘You mean you don’t know?’ She sounded surprised.

‘No.’

‘Those nice guards were going back to Merrion Square with him.’

‘Did they say that?’

‘He did. He was the one giving the instructions.’

Stefan drove on. Dessie always said that when things didn’t make sense, sometimes it was better left that way. It smelt like one of those times.

‘So where are you taking me now, Sergeant?’

‘I need a drink. You too. It’s not every day you’re beaten up by nuns.’

He expected her to bounce back a sarcastic remark; she had before. But she said nothing. She looked straight ahead through the windscreen. Then she put her hands to her face and sobbed, in almost complete silence.

*

Saturday. Dear Tom, Today I’ve been busy doing so many things I’m not sure what they all were. Some days are like that. But Christmas is coming, that’s the main thing. There’s the biggest Christmas tree you ever saw in O’Connell Street. They were there putting the lights and the decorations on. It’ll be something to see I’d say. The windows in Clery’s are full of toys. And boys from St Patrick’s were singing carols in Grafton Street. Tell your grandfather. The day you come up with Opa and Oma we’ll go and see it all. I hope the new calf’s getting better. Don’t worry about her. It’s no more than a bit of scour, and she’ll be tearing about again in no time.

Stefan put his pen down and looked up to see the woman watching him. He hadn’t seen her come into the bar. He had driven her back to her home in Rathgar so that she could repair some of the day’s damage. Now he was waiting in Grace’s, a pub close by. It sat at a busy road junction, south of the Grand Canal that marked the boundary between Dublin’s inner and outer suburbs, between streets where nothing ever grew and avenues wide enough for trees. The avenues of red-brick Victorian terraces fanned out all around Grace’s Corner, quiet and tidy, substantial and well-ordered. There was space here, and there was air, and on clear days, looking to the south and east, the round tops of the Dublin Mountains rose up in a ring, not far away.

The woman smiled. She was herself again. But make-up hadn’t quite covered the bruise on her cheek from the struggle in the convent.

‘You look a long way away.’ She sat down opposite him. There was a glass of light ale waiting for her. She picked it up and drank, still watching.

‘Not that far really, just West Wicklow. I was writing to my son.’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh?’

‘I suppose that’s not what I was expecting from a policeman.’

‘Having children?’

‘No, I meant –’ She laughed. ‘All right it was a silly thing to say.’

He folded the piece of paper in half and put it in his pocket.

‘How old is he?’

‘Four, nearly five. I’m up here and he’s down the country with his grandparents. I try to write something for them to read him most days. It doesn’t amount to much. Still, it makes me look for something in a day that’s worth saying to a child. It’s not always that easy to find.’

‘No. There won’t have been much today.’ She smiled, but behind it he could see the thing he couldn’t get hold of about her. Was it sadness, loss?

‘How often do you see him?’

‘I get down every Sunday I’m not working. It’s the best I can do.’

She wanted to ask more. She wondered why his son didn’t seem to have a mother. At that moment it felt as if they were two people who’d just met, sitting in a pub, starting to ask questions about each other. He wasn’t much older than she was. It felt ordinary in a way that nothing had for a long time. The pub felt ordinary too, in a way that she found reassuring. It was nearly two years since she had sat in Grace’s Lounge with the friends she grew up with, saying goodbye to them. The dark mahogany shone as it had always shone, so did the brass. There was the sound of familiar laughter, the smell of beer and cigarette smoke and furniture polish. The same watercolours of the same racehorses lined the walls; the same prints of the Curragh and Leopardstown, Fairyhouse and Punchestown. She wanted everything else to be the same, everything that couldn’t be. The feeling caught her unawares. And the guard sitting opposite her was unaccountably part of it. She didn’t know why he was so easy to talk to. But it didn’t matter how easy or how hard the conversation was. That wasn’t why she was there.

‘You look better now anyway,’ he smiled.

‘Hannah Rosen. That’s my name.’

‘I’m glad you’ve got one, but it doesn’t tell me much. It doesn’t tell me why you wouldn’t say who you were before. It doesn’t tell me why you solicited a miscarriage when you’re not pregnant. Or why you and Herr Keller were carted off by Special Branch, with him giving them orders. It doesn’t tell me why I don’t know anything about any of this, and you do.’

‘I don’t know much, really. I’m trying to work backwards.’

‘I’m a simple soul, Miss Rosen. Why not start at the beginning?’

She looked at him, hesitant, still not quite sure she could trust him.

‘Whatever it is you wanted from Keller, you didn’t get it, did you?’

She shook her head, watching him before she continued.

‘I’ve been away from Ireland for quite a long time. It’s almost a year and a half. In Palestine, I live there now. I’m probably going to stay there.’

The last words were spoken more reflectively. They weren’t for him at all. Clearly Palestine wasn’t a simple issue for her. But whatever issue it was it couldn’t have much to do with Hugo Keller and the Garda Special Branch.

‘I came back to Ireland for a reason. I came home be-cause –’ She had made her decision now. She liked him. She would trust him. ‘My friend, my oldest friend, Susan Field is – missing. She’s disappeared. She’s been gone for over five months. No one’s heard from her. No one knows where she is.’ She paused. Stefan just nodded, but didn’t say anything. She went on.

‘Susan and I have been friends since we were children. We grew up together in Little Jerusalem, in Lennox Street. We went to school together. We did everything together once. And all the time I’ve been in Palestine we’ve written to each other. A lot – I mean every few weeks. Her letters stopped coming at the end of July. I didn’t think there was anything wrong at first. I knew there was something, well, a problem – we still told each other everything. I thought that must have affected her. I thought she might not want to talk about it for a while. But somewhere I knew that wasn’t true. She would have written. There would have been even more reason to write if she was in trouble, not less. And then I got the letter from Susan’s father.’

Before she had been holding his gaze as she spoke, but now she was looking away from him. She was trying not to show how painful this was.

‘He said she’d disappeared. She’d been missing for almost six weeks then. None of her friends knew anything. The Guards couldn’t find any trace of her. They were still searching. He had to tell me – and he had to ask me –’

She met his eyes again now.

‘He had to ask me if I knew anything. I told him. But it didn’t make any difference. It was as if Susan had just walked out one morning and vanished off the face of the earth. The Guards, well, after all the weeks of looking for her, or supposedly looking for her, all they could come up with was that she’d taken the boat to England, and simply run away.’

‘Is that what Mr Field thinks?’

‘I don’t know. I think now he’s … almost forced himself to believe that. If he doesn’t, then what does he believe? She was twenty-three, Mr Gillespie. She was bright and full of life and independent and utterly bloody-minded. The idea that Susan would ever run away from anything is mad.’

‘You said there was a problem. What was it?’

‘Susan was a student at UCD. She was always very clever. But however clever you are you can get yourself into stupid situations. She had been having an affair with a man at the university. He was a lecturer. It started last year. She went into it with her eyes open. She made a choice.’

‘He was married?’

‘No, he was a priest.’

‘So that was the problem …’

‘It was one problem.’

‘Just tell me about it, Miss Rosen.’ He could see she needed to talk.

‘Well, I suppose … it was all very exhilarating at first. Susan needed that. She was always searching for excitement,’ Hannah smiled fondly. ‘But after a while it started to feel … claustrophobic. They couldn’t go anywhere. They couldn’t be seen together. And then she realised she was pregnant …’

‘That’s where Mr Keller comes in?’

She looked at him, trying to gauge his response, then she nodded.

‘Who else knew she was pregnant?’ he asked.

‘The priest. I don’t know …’

‘What about her parents?’

‘Her mother died five years ago. I’m sure she’d have talked to her if she’d been alive. Mrs Field was the heart of that family. Maybe too much. Susan always said she took the heart with her when she went.’ Hannah stopped, thinking about the past as much as the present. ‘Her father’s never been the same. I suppose he’s turned in on himself. He’s the cantor at the Adelaide Road Synagogue now. That’s his life, all his life. She couldn’t tell him. And her sisters are married. They’ve left Ireland. Things change, don’t they? It’s funny, I was always jealous of how close they all were.’

Stefan let her find her way back to the present before he continued. ‘A boat to England’s a common solution. It happens every day.’

‘Not Susan. And there was already a solution, wasn’t there?’

‘She’d made arrangements with Keller?’

‘It was the priest who knew about him. He did the arranging.’

Stefan couldn’t hide his look of surprise. It seemed to irritate her.

‘I didn’t mean to shock you, Sergeant.’

‘Shock would be overstating it, Miss Rosen.’ He smiled wryly.

‘Anyway, he knew where to go. He told her it was a proper clinic too, with a proper doctor. And he was going to pay for it all, she said.’

‘A gentleman as well as a scholar. It’s not what you’d expect.’

‘I don’t know. How do priests usually deal with these things?’

‘I don’t know either, Miss Rosen. I’m very rarely on my knees.’

‘That’s reassuring at least.’

‘So Susan wrote to you about the abortion?’

‘I had one letter telling me it was happening. Then she wrote to me again, the day before she went to the clinic. That was at the end of July. She was going on the twenty-sixth. I didn’t know it when I got that letter of course, but she disappeared the day after she sent it. And that’s all there is. No one knows where she went. No one’s seen her since.’

Stefan took this in.

‘Did she seem distressed about what was happening?’

‘I don’t think so. And I’d have known, even if she’d been putting on a brave face. It was something she had to do. She wasn’t jumping for joy, Sergeant, but I’d say the strongest feeling she had – was about drawing a line under it.’

Hannah dropped her head as she had done before, when she felt she was talking about Susan’s feelings in a way that didn’t quite fit a conversation with a policeman. Her hair fell forward each time and she brushed it out of her eyes, looking back up at Stefan with a slightly awkward combination of forthrightness and reserve. And each time, as their eyes met again, he was conscious that she was trusting him with her feelings as well as the facts. He somehow knew she didn’t do that easily. It happened of course, when people had no one else to talk to, when they’d bottled things up inside that they couldn’t tell anyone. As a policeman you relied on that sometimes. But this was different. At least he wanted it to be different. The sound of conversation and laughter all around him in Grace’s had faded away completely. Hannah spoke softly, but by now her words were all he heard. And he was conscious that he didn’t want her to stop talking to him.

‘So, do you think this abortion happened?’

‘Why wouldn’t it? She said she was going the next day.’

‘Isn’t it something she might have changed her mind about suddenly?’

She shook her head.

Stefan decided to take that at face value for the time being.

‘What did she tell you about Hugo Keller?’

‘She just knew what he did and that he did it in Merrion Square.’

‘And the priest set it all up?’

‘I told you. He was paying for it.’

‘So who is this priest?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t found him yet.’

He took note of the determination in those words; she would find him.

‘So your friend, who told you everything, didn’t tell you his name?’

‘When it started she almost liked the cloak and dagger element. It was as if she was breaking all the rules at once.’ There was the hint of a smile again, as Hannah thought about the friend she knew so well. Then she shrugged. ‘And she had a genuine desire to protect him. She was in love with him. She wanted to protect herself too.’ Hannah laughed. ‘Susan liked breaking the rules but she hated getting caught. She wouldn’t have called herself a practising Jew, but the idea of what people would say – an affair, with a goy, who was a Roman Catholic priest.’ She stopped. She wanted to keep laughing about her friend’s foibles, but all of a sudden it felt like another way of hiding her fear. Even what she was saying didn’t seem so funny now. ‘It wouldn’t have been nice. We Jews may have been the victims of everyone else’s prejudice, but we can find plenty of our own, Sergeant.’

‘When you contacted Mr Field, what did you tell him?’

‘I told him what she’d said in her letters.’

‘The affair, the abortion, the priest?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he passed the information on to the Guards?’

She nodded, slowly.

‘That couldn’t have been easy for him.’

‘I talked to him last week when I got home. He didn’t want to see me really.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know which was worse, his daughter disappearing, or what he found out about her afterwards, from me.’

‘Isn’t that a bit harsh?’

‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

‘All right, so what happened?’

‘The Guards didn’t come back to him for weeks. He went to Rathmines every day, and every day they said they’d be in touch when they had any information. Only there never was any. In the end they told him they had no reason to suspect foul play. Do you have a manual for those phrases? Anyway, it was the same story as before, there was only one conclusion. Susan couldn’t face him after what had happened. She did what that sort of girl does. She got the boat to England. But they did think, sooner or later, she’d contact him. That sort of girl usually does – eventually.’

‘Did they talk to the priest? Did they talk to Keller?’

‘No. The priest was a figment of her imagination, or just a lie. The man must have been married and she made up the priest because she couldn’t deal with the shame. A Jewish woman wouldn’t understand what the vow of celibacy really meant, and how unlikely an affair with a priest was, you see. As for abortions, the inspector said Mr Field could rest assured such things didn’t happen in Ireland. That was, sadly, why some women, now what was it again, oh yes, why some women took the boat to England.’

Stefan made no attempt to explain away what had happened. He couldn’t. He didn’t want the contempt in Hannah’s voice directed at him.

‘What were you going to ask Mr Keller?’

‘If my friend had arrived for her abortion, what happened then, oh, and who the priest was who paid for it all. That would have been a start.’

‘And do you imagine he’d have told you?’

‘I don’t know. That’s when you walked in.’

‘I don’t think your conversation with Keller would have lasted long.’

‘Why not? I’d just paid him for an abortion. I would have been happy to say that very loudly and very publicly. All I needed was information.’

‘The events of this evening make it clear Mr Keller isn’t without friends. He’s also a criminal who keeps a revolver in his desk drawer.’

‘I hadn’t thought about him shooting me. Perhaps I should have.’ She was laughing at him. It didn’t seem there was much she was afraid of.

‘So you’ve got a man, the priest. An appointment for a miscarriage. Let’s assume she went. You don’t think he’d have gone with her?’

‘They’d stopped seeing each other. She didn’t say he was going.’

‘Then there’s Keller, who’s unlikely to tell anybody anything. And Susan, who no one’s seen since July. It’s hard to know what it really says.’

‘I think I know.’ She held his gaze, unwavering now.

‘What’s that?’

‘It says Susan’s dead.’

He didn’t answer. Instead he reached across the table and took Hannah’s hand. She nodded. It was answer enough. She had known for a long time now, however much she had tried to persuade herself it couldn’t be true. Even as she spoke the words she still hoped Stefan would tell her she was wrong. And it would have been easy for him to. It was what he was meant to do as a detective, at least till there was evidence to prove otherwise. And there was no evidence at all, of anything. Not that anyone had really looked for any yet. But he had a sense of where looking was going to lead already. It was the total absence of facts that made pushing aside Hannah Rosen’s simple statement hard. Hannah knew her friend. It wasn’t a fact but it was as close to one as made no difference. He couldn’t tell her he didn’t understand what Susan Field’s silence was. It was the silence of the grave.

4. Stephen’s Green

The lights were still on in the house at twenty-five Merrion Square. It was almost ten o’clock. The uniformed officer Stefan Gillespie had left there was still on the steps. Garda Liam Dwyer had the collar of his coat turned up, his cap pulled down. Smoke hovered in front of his face. He was cold and hungry and pissed off. He should have ended his shift three hours ago.

‘I can’t let you go in, Sarge, sorry.’

‘Who says?’

‘Sergeant Lynch. It’s a Special Branch operation now.’

‘A serious business then, Liam. Is he inside?’

‘They’ve gone for a pint.’

‘I can see why they would. It’s thirsty work keeping the nation safe.’

‘No one goes in. That’s Sergeant Lynch’s orders.’

‘So what’s Jimmy Lynch up to in there?’

‘How do I know? I’m out here.’

‘There’s no fooling him, is there, Dessie?’

‘He’s got Special Branch orders, he needs to be on his toes, Sarge.’

‘You can piss off, Dessie. I’ve been here since this afternoon.’

‘Maybe they’ll bring you back a bottle of stout,’ laughed Dessie.

‘I hope you’re not thinking about putting in for any overtime from Inspector Donaldson when you get back to Pearse Street.’ Stefan shook his head with a look of mock concern. ‘He’s not happy about those two at all, especially Detective Sergeant Lynch. I’d say he had the holy water out when they left the station, and maybe the bell, book and candle. Will we go back and tell him you’re taking your orders from Special Branch now, Liam?

Garda Dwyer felt that a little more cooperation would be no bad thing.

‘They’ve been looking for something, Sarge,’ he said quietly.

‘Jimmy and Seán Óg?’

‘And the German feller. They were turning the place inside out.’

‘You know what they were looking for?’

‘I can’t see through the front door, not being a detective.’

Stefan smiled, but ignored the sarcasm.

‘Where’s Keller now?’ he snapped.

‘He went with them, Sarge. Not to the pub though.’

Stefan could see he knew where Hugo Keller was.

Dwyer smiled. ‘Any fags? I’m on my last one.’

‘I’m sure Dessie’s got some, Liam,’ replied Stefan.

Begrudgingly Dessie MacMahon pulled twenty Sweet Afton from his pocket. As he opened the packet, Stefan took it and handed it to Dwyer.

‘Hey, I’ve only just bought those!’

Liam Dwyer lit a cigarette from the stub in his mouth. He put the packet of Sweet Afton into his pocket and dropped the stub to the ground.

‘You’re not the gouger they crack you up to be, Dessie.’

‘So Keller’s not with Lynch?’ Stefan returned to the matter in hand.

‘He was off to the Shelbourne for a drink. There’s a Christmas party on, every German in Dublin. Jimmy Lynch said they’d see him back here.’

‘Well, it’s a pity we didn’t know there was a party. I’m sure the inspector would have told us to back off on the raid if someone had said. But they’re always the lads for a bit of Christmas spirit in Special Branch.’

‘How much longer do I stand here, Sarge? Can’t someone take over?’

Stefan laughed. ‘You’ll have to ask Sergeant Lynch that, Liam.’

The Shelbourne Hotel was warm and welcoming. Two flags still flew over the brightly lit entrance, looking out on to Stephen’s Green – the Nazi swastika and the Irish tricolour. As Detective Sergeant Gillespie and Garda MacMahon entered the frayed-at-the-edges splendour of the Shelbourne lobby the top-hatted doorman smiled. He also gave a quick, warning glance to the porter at his desk. He knew who they were. Detectives didn’t just call in there for a drink. The porter emerged from behind the desk with the same barely disguised combination of welcome and wariness.

‘Anything I can help you with, Mr Gillespie?’

‘There will be, Anto. When I’ve worked out what it is I’ll tell you.’

They walked towards the doors that opened into the dining room, which had been taken over for the evening by the German Christmas party. Stefan stopped and peered into the room. It was festooned with red and white and black swastika flags and red and white Christmas decorations. Inside there was a buzz of loud and cheerful German conversation. Men, women and children filled the tables and milled around amidst the debris of an almost completed meal. Just then a loud ‘Ho, ho, ho!’ boomed across the lobby. As Stefan and Dessie turned, they saw a fat, bearded figure in red, with a bulging sack over his shoulder, heading towards the dining room and the party. He was accompanied by a middle-aged elf in green and gold and a Brunhilde-like maiden, flaxen plaits and all, in German peasant costume. They also carried sacks of presents. The two detectives stepped back. Santa Claus and his companions burst into the dining room to the sound of applause. Children clustered round Santy as he fought his way through the crowd. Stefan turned to the porter, still hovering a little way behind them.

‘Hugo Keller, do you know him?’

‘Mr Keller, of course.’

‘Is he in there? I can’t see him.’

‘He’ll be in the bar. He was just now.’

They moved on towards the Horseshoe Bar.

‘It’s hardly likely Keller isn’t going to notice us,’ remarked Dessie.

‘I’d say you’re right.’

‘But aren’t we meant to be leaving him alone? Inspector Donaldson said the case is dead. And didn’t Lynch tell us to keep our noses out of it?’

‘Which case is that?’

‘What do you mean which case is that?’

‘This is about a missing woman. Susan Field. Twenty-three. Student at UCD. Lived in Little Jerusalem. Sixteen Lennox Street. She disappeared five months ago. We’re trying to trace her last known movements and find out who was the last person to see her. It’s a cold trail though. It’s bound to be after all this time. I’ve got a hunch Herr Keller might be able to help us.’

‘And where did all that come from?’

‘Hannah Rosen. She’s a friend of Susan Field’s.’

‘The woman –’

‘The woman we arrested at Keller’s house, the one who wasn’t having an abortion after all, and the one DS Lynch dumped on Mother Eustacia.’

‘It doesn’t sound much like leaving Keller alone.’

‘But this is a different inquiry altogether. We only want some help.’

‘What’s this missing woman got to do with Special Branch?’ Dessie didn’t like the sound of it. When Stefan started following his nose you never got much sense of where it would lead. But experience had taught the guard that it usually meant trouble. There didn’t seem any doubt about that here.

‘Nothing I should think. We don’t want to tread on those fellers’ toes.’

As they pushed their way into the small bar it was packed. People were spilling out into the hallway. Inside much of the conversation was in German, loud and enthusiastic and fuelled by large quantities of highly proofed Christmas cheer. The detectives squeezed through to the bar, Stefan apologising in festive German. Dessie caught the barman’s eye.

‘A hot whiskey.’

‘That’ll be two!’ called Stefan.

The barman poured two whiskeys and topped them up with hot water from the kettle. Stefan was trying to locate Keller. Dessie took the drinks and moved his hand towards the wallet in his jacket pocket. It was a gesture. He didn’t intend to pay and the barman didn’t expect him to. He simply waved his hand. It was on the house. It always was. Stefan pushed his way through the noisy crowd again, exchanging more Christmas greetings in German as he went. Then he stopped, close to a corner table where Hugo Keller sat with two other people. There was a sharp-featured, middle-aged man with balding, close-cropped hair and thick-rimmed circular glasses, and a younger man, with a shock of dark hair, wearing a brown suit that bore a small swastika emblem on one lapel. The two older men were arguing. It wasn’t comfortable and it certainly wasn’t festive. But they spoke quietly and it was impossible for Stefan to pick up even a few of the words. The younger man sat back, smoking a Turkish cigarette, with an expression of impatience. Keller became aware someone was watching him. He looked up.

Hugo Keller was surprised, but it was only seconds before the same look of supercilious self-confidence he had shown when he was arrested reappeared. The other two looked at Sergeant Gillespie too. They had no idea who he was. Keller fired some kind of explanation, unheard over the melee. The older man in glasses looked even more ill-tempered. He was distinctly put out by the explanation. The three got up abruptly. Stefan smiled at the abortionist and raised his glass. ‘Fröhliche Weihnachten!’ The Christmas greeting spread through the bar, until even the three men trying to leave were forced to respond to the people around them wishing them a Merry Christmas. Hugo Keller was only a few feet from Stefan, who was still irritated by the smirk of invulnerability that hung about his smile. ‘Did you find what you were looking for, Herr Doktor Keller?’ He stressed ‘Doktor’. The smirk disappeared. Stefan had thrown these words out on a whim, but he had got something back. Whatever was being searched for at twenty-five Merrion Square, it hadn’t been found. Then Keller was gone. The detectives downed the whiskeys and pushed their way back through the crowd to the hotel lobby. As they extricated themselves at last from the bar, the three Germans were ahead of them, just turning into the dining room.

People were stepping aside for Father Christmas and his entourage, now emerging from the party, their task completed. Chriskindl continued to call out ‘Ho, Ho, Ho,’ and ‘Herzliche Weihnachtsgrüsse!’ He reached into his pocket and handed small Nazi lapel pins to anyone sitting in the hotel lobby or passing through it. He grabbed Stefan’s reluctant hand and thrust one into it. The policemen carried on to the doors that opened into the party. All around children were playing with their gifts from Santy, at the tables, on the floor. Several of them ran out into the lobby chasing a boy who held a model fighter plane over his head, all making rat-tat-tat machine gun noises.

In the restaurant, waiters were ladling out mulled wine. Someone started playing the piano. After only a few notes an abrupt and almost complete silence descended on the noisy gathering. A boy of nine or ten was lifted up on to one of the tables. He started to sing. As he did, everyone in the room who wasn’t already standing, rose. Detective Sergeant Gillespie was one of the few people – besides the partygoers – who understood the words. They had nothing to do with Christmas, but after some of the day’s events they made him feel very uncomfortable. ‘Deutschland erwache aus deinem bösen Traum! Gib fremden Juden in deinem Reich nicht Raum!’ Germany wake from this fearful dream. Give Jews no room to live and scheme. Germany arise, our battle cry. Our Aryan blood shall never die! There were tears in watching German eyes. Even Dessie MacMahon, who understood not a single word, was captivated by the boy’s perfect voice.

‘Let’s go, Dessie,’ said Stefan abruptly.

As they turned, he beckoned the porter over. He looked back into the room once more, pointing to where the two men who had been with Keller stood, watching the boy as he sang, with the same rapture as everyone else. There was no sign of Keller now. He didn’t seem to be there any more.

‘So who are the two fellers who were with Mr Keller, Anto?’

‘I don’t know the young one, Mr Gillespie. He’s something to do with the German embassy though. But everyone knows the older one. That’s Mr Mahr, Adolf Mahr. He’s the director of the National Museum. We know him very well in the Shelbourne.’ There was just a hint of condescension. Anybody who was anybody ought to know who Adolf Mahr was.

Stefan nodded. He knew the name well enough, even if he didn’t know the face. Was it The Irish Times that had called Adolf Mahr ‘the father of Irish archaeology’? Or was it Éamon de Valera? Mahr was an important man. He was certainly a friend of de Valera’s, which made you an important man now, whatever you did. He was also head of the Nazi Party in Ireland.

Then all at once the whole dining room erupted into song as the first verse was repeated, with everyone singing now – Adolf Mahr and the man from the German embassy too. The sound seemed to fill the Shelbourne Hotel. ‘Germany arise, our battle cry. Our Aryan blood shall never die!’

Stefan and Dessie walked out on to Stephen’s Green.

Dessie was still humming the tune he’d heard inside.

‘I’ll say that for the Jerries, they know how to throw a party.’

Stefan was aware that he was still holding something in his hand. He looked down at the small brass lapel pin Santy had given him. It was the size of a farthing, a black swastika on white enamel. Round the edge was a circle of red with the words ‘Deutschland Erwache’. Germany Awake.

Neither of them had noticed the fair-haired man sitting in a leather armchair by the porter’s desk in the Shelbourne lobby. As they left he was still reading the same page of The Irish Times he had been reading when they stepped inside the hotel. Folding the newspaper and tucking it under his arm, he sauntered out after them with a nod to the porter, whistling the music that still echoed from the dining room. He stood on the steps, watching the detectives walk to the corner. Dessie MacMahon crossed over and continued along Stephen’s Green; Stefan Gillespie turned into Kildare Street. The fair-haired man walked to the same corner, lighting a cigarette. He waited until Stefan had left the lights of the Shelbourne behind and then followed him.

Kildare Street was almost empty. The National Library and the National Museum were dark, along with the buildings of government they framed at Leinster House. On the other side of the road the offices in the flat-fronted Georgian terraces were dark as well. A few taxis trundled up to Stephen’s Green in search of customers. A man walked past with a Yorkshire terrier. A young couple, slightly drunk, crossed the road, arm in arm, giggling, as Stefan made his way home to Nassau Street. A lot had happened, but very little about the day made sense. Keller, the clinic, Hannah Rosen, Jimmy Lynch and Special Branch, the Convent of the Good Shepherd, Susan Field. As he passed the National Museum the unlikely company Hugo Keller kept struck him again. Why had a Special Branch detective sprung him from custody, only to deliver him to the Shelbourne for a conversation with a German embassy official and the director of the National Museum? And what about the missing woman? Was he right to trust Hannah Rosen’s instincts? Was it really so unreasonable that a pregnant woman couldn’t face an abortion and just ran away? For a moment the questions faded, and he smiled to himself, thinking about Hannah again. He remembered not wanting the conversation with her to stop. Perhaps he should have felt more uneasy about that, because it had nothing to do with what they were talking about. Yet he wasn’t. He was thinking about her in ways he still only associated with his dead wife. And there was nothing wrong with it. There was an exhilaration in him now that he had almost forgotten. But none of that had anything to do with why he trusted Hannah’s instincts. That had to do with being a policeman. Since leaving Hannah in Rathgar, the sense that something very nasty had happened to Susan Field had only grown in him.

The wall of Trinity College, with the tall trees behind it, stretched ahead of him as he reached Nassau Street. It was noisier here. The pubs and restaurants were still turning out. There were taxis and trams; there were Christmas decorations in the shop windows; there was the breath of beer and whiskey in the cold air. He unlocked the narrow door squeezed in between O’Dea’s optician’s and Duval et Cie’s Parisian Dyers and Cleaners. The two rooms in Nassau Street he rented from James O’Dea were above the optician’s shop, on the first floor. The room at the front looked out over the gardens of Trinity. Mr O’Dea had told him, as if he should be paying extra, that if you stood on a chair you could see over the wall. In the year he had spent at Trinity he knew the gardens well enough. In fact the college gardens were the only thing he’d ever really liked about the place. But he never did have any desire to stand on a chair in the window to look at them. As he opened the door on to the steep staircase, the fair-haired man had stopped at the corner of Kildare Street. He watched Stefan Gillespie go in.

Stefan was surprised to see the light on in the hall. It wasn’t very welcoming; a bare bulb, no shade, and only twenty-five watts. But the optician didn’t usually let the lights burn late. He had a habit of taking the fuses out at night so none of his tenants could leave them on and waste his money. Late home always meant feeling your way up the stairs and along the landing in the darkness. But now, when Stefan reached the turn in the stairs, he could see the door to his room was open. Someone was inside.

He leapt the remaining stairs and raced across the landing. He stood in the doorway. The room had been turned inside out and upside down. The drawers had been tipped out, the sofa was on its back, books had been swept off the bookcase on to the floor; the contents of the kitchen cabinet were everywhere. Then he heard a sound. There was someone in the bedroom. He moved more quietly now, across the room to the door by the window. But even as he took the first steps, he sensed there was someone behind him, someone who must have heard him coming. He didn’t have time to turn round. Hard wood hit his head. And he collapsed, unconscious, to the floor.

There was darkness inside his head and a dull throbbing pain. Before full consciousness came, he felt as if he was struggling to climb out of that darkness; when he tried to move his limbs nothing happened. Then his eyes opened abruptly and adrenalin pumped the realisation of danger through his body. He knew his attackers were still there. Cold water was dripping down his face. There was the smell of whiskey. A round, red face looked down at him, so close that for a moment he saw only the eyes. A hand poured water from a jug. As the face retreated he saw the mouth open into a grin of uneven, tobacco-stained teeth. He was being pulled up by his shoulders from the floor. For an instant he was upright, but only for an instant, before he was pushed into an armchair. Detective Garda Seán Óg Moran looked down at him. The grin was instantly replaced by a look of vacancy, as if the guard had just shifted into neutral, and was simply marking time. Stefan turned his head. It hurt. And it would hurt more. He already knew who he’d find looking at him next. There was a smile on Detective Sergeant Jimmy Lynch’s pinched lips too. Or maybe he’d just bitten into a lemon.

‘You should have said, Jimmy. I’d have had the kettle on.’

‘I wanted it to be a surprise.’

‘I’ll have to see if I can a find a surprise for you some time.’

‘They say you’re quite the clever lad, Stevie.’

‘I’ve been cleverer.’ He raised his hand to touch the back of his head.

‘I told Inspector Donald Duck to keep his fucking nose out of Special Branch business, and yours. Did the holy bastard not pass that on to you?’

‘He did say something. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention.’

‘I can say it louder.’

Lynch looked round. Moran stepped forward.

‘If you told me what Special Branch business it was –’

Seán Óg’s fist hit his face full on. It may have been luck that it wasn’t harder, or maybe the detective garda knew how to judge these things. If it had been harder, it would have broken Stefan’s nose. As it was he could feel the warm trickle of blood; seconds later he tasted the salt on his lips.

‘That’s a lot clearer. It’ll be a matter of national security then.’

‘No, it’ll be a matter of how far Seánie can push your nose into your face if you don’t do what your inspector said. I can’t stand insubordination. That’s right, isn’t it, Seánie?’ Lynch smiled. Moran’s yellow teeth showed again; his shoulders moved up and down several times; a snort of laughter.

‘I’m missing something, that’s the thing, Stevie.’

For the first time, Stefan didn’t reply. For the first time, Jimmy Lynch was giving him information about what he was doing here.

‘I want everything you took from Keller’s,’ he continued.

‘You’ve got it.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Inspector Donaldson gave it to you. Dessie said you took the lot.’

The pinched lips became a little more pinched and Lynch’s smile screwed itself into something less assured. The expression wasn’t very different, except that the lemon he’d bitten into now was even sourer than the first. But it told Stefan more. Lynch had come here believing something had been taken from Hugo Keller’s clinic, something that wasn’t with the other evidence. That’s what the two of them had been looking for in his room. Whatever it was, the Special Branch sergeant wasn’t sure Stefan had it after all now. It wasn’t difficult to be convincing; he had no idea what Lynch was talking about. The Special Branch man was becoming uneasy; to go any further he would have to reveal what he was looking for. But he had spoken to Keller. He knew what Stefan Gillespie had said in the Shelbourne.

‘Why did you ask Keller if he’d found what he was looking for?’

‘Because you pissed me off. You’d get a lot of that, I expect.’

‘You piece of shite.’ Garda Moran moved forward again. But a look from his sergeant stopped the blow that was about to follow. Lynch was dimly aware that his interrogation was giving more than it was getting back. And he was right. Stefan knew Keller must have phoned Jimmy Lynch from the hotel. That’s why he was turning the place inside out. He also knew he needed to persuade Jimmy he was wasting his time before things got worse.

‘Some arsehole walks off with my prisoners and a case that might not have done me any harm at Garda HQ. I get a bollocking from my inspector for doing my job. I wanted to find out whether anything else was coming my way. Why would I take any notice of Donald Duck? So I went back to Merrion Square. I wanted to know what was going on. Wouldn’t you?’

Here was something Lynch understood; begrudgery and self-interest.

‘I thought you’d be at the Shelbourne with Keller, that’s all, Jimmy.’

The Special Branch sergeant got up from the chair. It was a movement that told Garda Moran the interrogation was over. He could relax. Seán Óg was not a man who took pleasure in inflicting physical violence on people; it was just his job. And now, for the moment anyway, the job was finished.

‘Will we go back and try the woman again, Jimmy?’

The detective sergeant frowned, his mind elsewhere. Stefan Gillespie was no longer relevant. He nodded at Moran, then turned to go to the door.

‘No chance of you lads helping me clear the place up so?’

‘You’ve got the message now, Stevie?’ Lynch glanced back.

‘Oh, yes, loud and clear, Jimmy.’

And with that he was gone. Moran followed. Stefan pulled himself up out of the armchair, gasping at a sudden surge of pain. Seán Óg was still in the doorway. He smiled awkwardly, almost childishly. This time the stained teeth were hidden. The smile was entirely genuine now. He had done his job, that’s all. And naturally, there were no hard feelings, why would there be?

‘Thank you, Sarge.’

Stefan felt he had no option but to return the smile. No, no hard feelings. The Special Branch detective closed the door. As the footsteps sounded down the stairs the door swung open again. The lock was on the floor. Also on the floor was a half-bottle of whiskey. Stefan bent down – grimacing – and picked it up. He unscrewed the cap and drank what was left.

5. Clanbrassil Street

The next morning Stefan Gillespie walked along Nassau Street, still aching from the attentions of Seán Óg Moran, to the telephone kiosks in Grafton Street. The city centre was quiet; it was Sunday and still early. He got through to the number in Rathgar that Hannah Rosen had given him. A man answered. It was an elderly voice, cautiously polite; it would be her father. When he gave his name as Detective Sergeant Gillespie, he could feel the coldness at the other end. It was the palpable wish that whatever was going on simply wasn’t going on. Stefan doubted that Hannah would have told her father very much of the previous day’s events; it felt like even the little she had said had been too much. When Hannah came to the phone, he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t pleased to hear her voice. There was a slight awkwardness as the conversation began. He asked her how she was. It wasn’t an unreasonable question after everything that had happened. Her answer sounded a lot more brusque than he either expected or wanted.

‘I’m fine. Have you found anything out?’

‘Not about Susan.’

‘When are you going to talk to Hugo Keller?’

‘I’m working on it.’

‘What does that mean?’ There was a hint of exasperation already. She wanted results and it felt like he was fobbing her off. He was. He didn’t have any information about her friend, and after the Shelbourne Hotel and the visit from Jimmy Lynch last night, his head was full of things he couldn’t even tell her, let alone explain. He couldn’t explain them to himself yet.

‘I wanted to see the letters, that’s all. Susan’s letters to you. I wondered if you could bring them in to me? I haven’t got that long today –’

When he had decided to phone her, he had only half worked out why. He did need to see the letters of course, and the train journey to Baltinglass, travelling home to see his son for the day, would be a quiet opportunity to read them. It wasn’t just an excuse to meet her, but it was partly that too.

‘I can come into town.’ She wanted him to have the letters; at least it meant something was actually happening. But she also wanted to see him.

‘I won’t be here this afternoon. I thought –’

‘I can come now. Are you at Pearse Street?’

‘No. Maybe I could meet you somewhere.’ He hadn’t planned on going into the station anyway. It was his day off. But after last night he felt that the less anyone, especially Inspector Donaldson, knew about what he was doing, the more likely it was that he would be allowed to do it.

He left the phone kiosk and carried on up Grafton Street. He turned into the little alleyway that led past the stone arch into St Teresa’s Church. There were a few early mass-goers heading that way. He could read their thoughts as they looked at his bruised face and blackened eyes. He would be better off going in through the arch and getting down on his knees than walking past. He was unaware that the fair-haired man who had been looking at the Christmas display in Switzer’s turned into the alley after him, following him as he walked on to Clarendon Street and Golden Lane, then along Bull Alley, past St Patrick’s Cathedral and into Clanbrassil Street.

The ancient cathedral was very still. It would be another hour before the great bells started to ring for the Eucharist, calling the scattered remnants of Anglican Dublin to worship in what had once been the public heart of the city. In the new Ireland it was already a forgotten backwater; the power was somewhere else now. It brooded over Dublin like a befuddled, senile uncle whose past life it wasn’t quite decent to talk about. As a child Stefan had lived on the other side of Clanbrassil Street, in the Coombe, before his father’s promotion to inspector brought a move out of the cramped flat to a suburban terrace in Terenure. For four of those years he had gone to the cathedral’s choir school. He had sung in the choir stalls at matins and evensong and the Sunday Eucharist. Matins would be over now. As he glanced across at the great stone tower, he could see the light of the stained-glass windows he had once looked up at, day after day. He heard a snatch of half-remembered music in his head; Stanford’s maybe. ‘To thee all angels cry aloud.’ He walked on towards the noise and bustle of Lower Clanbrassil Street, a narrow, crowded corridor into the city from the suburbs to the south that was always busier on a Sunday than anywhere else in Dublin.

It was the smell of bread that reminded him how he had walked home each Sunday after the Eucharist with Sam Mortimer, each of them eating a warm bagel from Weinrouk’s bakery. Mr Moiselle had always baked the bread there, but the smell of yeast and baking bread was only the first of the smells in Clanbrassil Street on a Sunday morning. He breathed it in now and other smells followed almost immediately. There was blood from the meat and poultry, slaughtered before dawn, hanging outside Myer Rubinstein’s butcher’s shop; the smell of new milk and sour cream from Jacob Fine’s dairy; through the open door of Doris Waterman’s grocer’s a pungent mix of salami and garlic sausage, salted fish and herrings, spices and pickled cucumbers. He had walked along Clanbrassil Street from time to time since he knew it as a child; as a student at Trinity in the brief, unhappy year he spent there; and as a recruit to the newly formed Garda Síochána soon afterwards, in an unforgiving uniform, to the sound of whistles and laughter from shopkeepers and their customers amused by his youth. But he had always been on the way somewhere else. He had never stopped. Today he did. He stepped into Weinrouk’s bakery, catching the sharp mix of words that was as pungent as Clanbrassil Street’s smells; the familiar voices of Dublin, the thick accents of Poland and Lithuania, and all the overlapping voices in between, loud and laughing and argumentative, peppering the English Dublin had made so distinctively its own with Yiddish.

The voices felt stranger today than they had when he was a child; then they had been too commonplace to be remarkable. Then the Yiddish simply sounded like another kind of German. His own home was a place where English and German were spoken. His mother had been determined that he should have her language too; she called it hers, even though she had been born in Dublin like him, because words were something precious to her.

In the crowded bakery he bought a bagel and the loaf of bread that he had often brought home for his German grandmother on those Sunday mornings. He would bring one back to Baltinglass for his mother today. The bagel was warm, as it always had been; he remembered that. At the counter, beside him, were two girls, aged around eight and ten, very neatly dressed, their hair in pigtails. He was surprised that Mr Moiselle spoke to them in German, not very good German it had to be said, though it may have been better Yiddish. As he handed a bag of golden, plaited loaves across the counter, he gave them a small, miniature version of the loaf. He had baked some for his grandchildren and there were two left. ‘Plaited like your hair!’

Stefan walked out behind the two girls. At the kerb was a black car he hadn’t noticed before. A man and a woman sat in the front. The man got out and opened the back door. One of the girls held up the miniature loaf. ‘It’s a present from Mr Moiselle.’ She spoke in German. The girls clambered on to the back seat. As the man shut the rear door and turned to get back into the car he suddenly looked up at Stefan. And Stefan recognised him now, from the Shelbourne the previous night; it was Adolf Mahr. The director of the National Museum wasn’t sure, but he knew he recognised this man from somewhere. He nodded politely, clearly registering the bruises on Stefan’s face but too well-mannered to show it. ‘A beautiful morning,’ he said.

‘It’s not so bad,’ replied Stefan. Mahr smiled, amused by the Irish understatement that meant, yes, it really was a beautiful morning. As the car drove away, Stefan saw there were several other people watching it head up past St Patrick’s, apparently glad to see it go. He wasn’t the only one who thought a Jewish baker’s an odd place for the leader of the Nazi Party in Ireland to shop.

He walked on, taking the hot bagel from its bag and eating it as he had eaten as a child. Crossing the street he looked back, waiting for a horse and cart to pass. A fair-haired man stopped quite abruptly to take out a packet of Senior Service. He hunched over his hands, lighting the cigarette. There was something strange. Maybe it was the abruptness; there couldn’t be that much urgency about a cigarette, even if you were gasping for one. And the man stood out somehow. Hanging about in Clanbrassil Street, among people whose most natural activity was hanging about in Clanbrassil Street, he looked like he should have been sitting in a pew in St Patrick’s Cathedral. And Stefan knew he had seen him before. The man drew on his cigarette and crossed the road, with a studied casualness that was in peculiar contrast to the abruptness of only seconds earlier. Stefan smiled. They were the actions of a man who was following someone, and wasn’t very good at it.

‘How’s the bagel?’

He turned round. ‘Good.’ He hadn’t seen Hannah approaching.

‘So much better when I was a girl. Mr Moiselle was a baker, not a businessman then.’ She stopped, staring at his face. ‘What happened?’

‘I accidentally trod on someone’s toes.’

‘Does that mean you’re not going to tell me?’

‘Taking one consideration with another –’

‘I see, a policeman’s lot –’ She was still puzzled. ‘Has it got something to do with Susan’s disappearance? Is that why you won’t –’

‘Yesterday was a strange day. Someone needed to mark his territory.’

She shrugged off the lack of communication with a smile. If he wasn’t going to tell her any more, she wouldn’t ask. But he saw it had been registered. It wouldn’t be forgotten. For now there were other things to do.

‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’

‘I can’t. I’ve got to catch the train. I’m going down to Baltinglass.’

‘Oh yes, of course, your son.’

He nodded. He didn’t say any more, but he was glad she remembered.

‘I’ve got them here,’ she said, taking a small bundle of letters from her bag. She handed them to him and he put them in his pocket. She watched as if she didn’t want to let them go. He saw how precious they were to her.

‘I’ll let you have them straight back. I’m sorry, I do have to go.’

‘Are you going to Kingsbridge?’

‘Yes.’ He glanced at his watch.

‘I’ll walk a little way with you.’

She was the first to move, touching his arm tentatively as they walked on. It was barely for a second, but it was a gesture of intimacy nonetheless. She was brighter again now, chatting quietly about nothing in particular.

‘I’m going to see my aunt. She’s always complaining Ma and Pa never call in. They do, all the time, and she always comes home with them after shul, but she likes to tell us about our airs and graces now that we live across the canal. We moved from Lennox Street when I was sixteen, but she’s not a great one for new topics of conversation. When I get there she’ll complain about me coming too, because I didn’t tell her I was!’

He smiled, enjoying her voice. They walked on in silence.

‘Do you know who Adolf Mahr is?’

She looked surprised. It was a strange question. ‘Yes.’

‘As director of the National Museum or as Nazi Party leader?’

‘I don’t suppose the Nazi role’s common knowledge everywhere, but some of us have better reasons to know about these things than others. Irish Jews don’t find it reassuring that all the Germans the government employs have got their own little Nazi Party here. I don’t remember seeing a swastika in Dublin before I left. Yesterday there was one outside the Shelbourne.’

‘He was here just now. His car was outside the bakery. There were two girls buying bread. His daughters, presumably. It seemed a bit odd –’

Hannah laughed.

‘Some things are so awful even the most devoted Nazi has to put aside his deepest prejudices. Irish bread. Even the master race can’t stomach it.’

‘Bread?’

‘He comes every Sunday. It’s the nearest he can find to a Vienna loaf in Dublin. But he can’t go inside the shop because it’s Jewish. So he sends his daughters. Everyone knows. Susan told me in one of her letters. It’s a standing joke. Mostly people laugh about it. I don’t know how funny it is –’

He felt an uncomfortable sense of connection, not with Hannah, but with Adolf Mahr. It was what his grandmother used to say. ‘They can’t make bread. They don’t know how. For God’s sake, once a week let’s have good bread!’ They walked on without speaking. Her mood had changed.

‘Was that just an idle question?’

‘What?’

‘About Adolf Mahr.’

He was right; she didn’t miss much.

‘The German community had a Christmas party last night, at the Shelbourne. It’s why the Nazi flag was flying. He was there with Keller.’

‘That’s nice for Doctor Keller. He’s got a lot of friends.’

‘It does seem like it.’

‘Is that why you were beaten up?’

He shrugged. It wasn’t exactly the truth, but he couldn’t deny it.

‘I suppose it proves you’re not one of his friends too.’ She stopped. ‘I’m going this way. Have a good day with your son. It’s going to rain though!’ As she turned, smiling, she touched his arm again. He watched her walk away, sensing that she hadn’t wanted to go. Or maybe that was what he wanted to believe, because he didn’t want her to go. It was a long time since he had felt like this, and he wasn’t at all sure how good his judgement was.

When Stefan Gillespie turned away from the ticket window at Kingsbridge Station, he saw the tall, fair-haired man again, sitting on a bench, reading the Irish Independent; the man who had stopped so abruptly for a cigarette in Clanbrassil Street; the man he was now convinced was following him. And as the man turned a page and leant back – just as he had turned a page and leant back into a leather armchair, in the entrance to the Shelbourne Hotel the night before, Stefan remembered that was where he had first seen him. There were still fifteen minutes to go before the train left for Baltinglass. He walked across the station concourse, back towards the street. He stood close to the entrance, looking at a rack of newspapers and magazines. Outside, a taxi drew up. A man and a woman got out. As the man paid the driver, Stefan walked briskly out of the station. He opened the taxi door and got in.

‘Straight across the river, over the bridge. As quick as you can.’

The driver pulled away with a sour glance in the mirror.

‘And where am I going then?’

Stefan looked through the back window. The fair-haired man had just emerged from the station, looking up and down, his eyes fixed on the departing taxi. There could be no doubt at all; the man was following him.

‘If you’re in a hurry, you’ll want to tell me where you’re going, sir.’

‘Just turn round at the other end and drop me back at the station.’

‘What the fuck is this? There’s a bloody minimum fare –’

Inside Kingsbridge, the fair-haired man was at the ticket office window, talking to the clerk who had sold Stefan his ticket. He was unaware that the man he had been watching was now watching him. He walked to a platform where a train was disgorging passengers. He looked for a moment, then moved to a hoarding and ran his finger down the printed timetable. Stefan was right behind him now. The man turned. As he did, Stefan grabbed his shoulders and slammed him up against the hoarding, very hard.

‘Baltinglass, that’s where I’m going. Why do you want to know?’

The response wasn’t what he expected. The fair-haired man grinned.

‘You’re back.’

‘And you’re not very good at this.’

‘I didn’t think I was doing badly. It’s a shame about your nose.’

‘It’s Jimmy and Seán I owe that to, but any friend of theirs –’

‘Friend would be overstating it. You’re going to miss your train.’

Stefan took his hands from the man’s shoulders. He looked over to the platform, where a few passengers were now boarding. Smiling amiably, the man brushed the shoulders and lapels of his coat. He held out his hand.

‘John Cavendish.’

‘You’re not Special Branch.’ Stefan ignored the proffered hand.

‘Oh, I’d say you’re a better detective than that, Sergeant.’

The Tullow train pulled out of Kingsbridge. It wasn’t a corridor carriage and they had the compartment to themselves. No one would hear; that mattered to Cavendish. He had made Stefan wait on the platform till the last minute.

‘I’m a bit like you, Sergeant.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I’m not supposed to be doing this.’

‘What is it I’m not supposed to be doing?’

‘I don’t know what Sergeant Lynch would make of you meeting Miss Rosen today. I assume you’ve been warned off Keller.’ He tapped his nose. ‘Well, you didn’t have that when you left the Shelbourne last night.’

‘Are you going to tell me who you are?’

‘I’m actually Lieutenant John Cavendish.’ He reached into his pocket and took out a leather card case. He pulled out a neatly printed card.

Stefan looked down at it. He shook his head, stifling his laughter.

‘I’m sorry, am I missing a joke?’ frowned the lieutenant.

‘You’re with G2?’

‘More or less.’

‘And you give out cards saying Military Intelligence?’

‘Well, someone had them printed up,’ he grinned amiably.

‘And more or less means –’

‘Not leaving undone those things that ought to be done simply because our political masters have instructed us to leave them undone.’

‘This could go on for some time, couldn’t it? And I’d say I’ll still have no idea what you’re talking about. So why are you following me?’

‘I did think you were working with Lynch.’

‘Does it look like I am?’

‘No. I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t know why you arrested Hugo Keller, only to have Special Branch pull him out of a cell in Pearse Street and take him home. I don’t know who Hannah Rosen is or what she’s got to do with Keller. I don’t know why you met her today when you’ve been told, in a variety of ways I imagine, to lay off Herr Keller now. But I’d hazard a guess that Lynch is looking for something he thought you had.’

‘And is that what you’re after too, Lieutenant?’

Cavendish looked at him, saying nothing. He had been thrown into this conversation abruptly and unexpectedly. Whatever about the nonchalant smiles, he had blown what was meant to be a simple surveillance.

‘It’s not my business, Lieutenant. I don’t want to get between you and Special Branch. You’ll have important work to do, following one another round Dublin. I just arrested an abortionist when nobody wanted me to.’

‘What happened to the evidence you took out of Merrion Square?’

‘Lynch has got it.’ Stefan smiled. ‘Except for what’s missing.’

‘And what is missing?’

‘Give me a clue. I might have seen it, who knows?’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘It means it would take a lot more than a punch in the face from Jimmy Lynch’s bulldog to make me give up something worth having. So what’s your offer? You don’t look like the shite-kicking sort, Cavendish.’

The soldier didn’t reply. He was trying to get the measure of Stefan. He wasn’t sure about him. Was he joking? Was he really hiding something?

‘Look, I haven’t got it, Lieutenant. I don’t even know what it is.’

‘So what are you doing then?’ persisted Cavendish.

‘My job.’

‘And where does Keller come into your job now?’

There seemed no reason not to tell the truth. It wasn’t a secret.

‘I’m looking for a woman who disappeared earlier this year. The last thing she did was go to Merrion Square for an abortion. That makes Hugo Keller the last person who saw her, the last I know about anyway. That’s what I’m doing. So what about you? Why don’t you tell me what you and Special Branch are looking for? Did Keller keep a list of his customers?’

‘That would be some of it,’ replied the lieutenant.

‘I guess there’d have to be more to interest Special Branch?’

Cavendish’s silence gave him his answer. Then the officer smiled.

‘So what do you know about Hugo Keller, Sergeant?’

‘As a posh backstreet abortionist, he’s got some unusual friends. And he seems to generate a surprising amount of activity in unexpected places. What with Special Branch dancing round him, not to mention the director of the National Museum, who happens to be the leader of the Nazi party the Germans have set up here, and now Military Intelligence, I can’t decide whether he’s a national treasure or a threat to national security. Which is it?’

The lieutenant didn’t answer. ‘So, who is this missing woman?’

‘I doubt she’s going to be of any interest to G2 or to Special Branch. She’s just a woman no one’s seen for a long time. I’d be surprised if she’s alive. I don’t know how, or why, but that’s what I think. That’s what I was talking to Hannah Rosen about. It’s what I intend to talk to Herr Doktor Keller about, whether it goes down well with Military Intelligence, or Special Branch, or the German embassy, or my inspector or anybody else.’

‘Well, if determination was all there was to it, Sergeant –’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Adolf Mahr drove Keller to Dún Laoghaire last night and put him on the mail boat. He’ll be in London by now, I’d say on his way to Germany.’

Lieutenant Cavendish got out at Naas, where the train took the branch line that led along the River Slaney and the western edge of the Wicklow Mountains to Baltinglass. And as the train set off again Stefan Gillespie took out the letters Hannah Rosen had given him. Immediately he found himself in a world that was complex, intense and unfamiliar. Naturally enough, the letters between two old and close friends were full of epigrammatic references to people and events he could know nothing about, both in the lives they had shared in Dublin and in the lives they now led in Ireland and Palestine. As a detective he had tried to piece together the jigsaw of a stranger’s life before, but this had an intimacy that at once absorbed him and made him uncomfortable. Susan Field almost certainly wrote as she spoke. Her words tumbled over each other and took tangential, unlooked for directions, sometimes finding their way back, circuitously, to what she had started speaking about, sometimes leaving the original thought behind, never to return. Several times she made him laugh out loud – once when she described sitting in the gallery of the Adelaide Road synagogue on a Saturday morning, mesmerised by a man who had fallen asleep below, wondering how long it would be before the growing intensity of his snores would be loud enough to compete with the cantor’s recitation of a psalm; another time, when she kept patting the packet of cigarettes in her coat pocket to reassure herself that soon, very soon, she would be outside the synagogue drawing in the invigorating smoke that was all the more desirable because it was forbidden on the Sabbath. It reminded her, she wrote, of the time she and Hannah, just seventeen, tore along the South Circular Road after shul to light a cigarette in a doorway, only to meet the pious and disapproving faces of Mrs Wigoder and Mrs Noyk. He could feel the vitality of Susan Field in her breathless words; it brought him closer to the loss that consumed Hannah. It wasn’t hard. His own loss wasn’t buried very deep.

The letters were punctuated by words Stefan didn’t quite understand, but every so often there was something familiar about the closeness of a community that was both a part of the world around it and at the same time engaged in its own private rituals and habits. Catholic Ireland was a public event, but his own childhood, especially the teenage years, when his Sunday mornings still belonged to the Church of Ireland, didn’t feel very different to some of Susan Field’s memories. There was the same mix of boredom, irritation and impatience; there was the same sense of something apart. He looked out of the window, seeing the water of the Slaney for the first time, and to the east the round-topped Wicklow Mountains. He played no part in all that now. He couldn’t remember when he last sat in the church by the river in Baltinglass. Yet he still knew that what his father always said was true; it wasn’t just a more private way of looking at the world; it was about keeping your head down. His parents still did keep their heads down.

By the end of the first few letters Susan Field’s swirling narrative had moved from the past to new excitement about being at University College Dublin. He knew her better here. And he still felt the closeness between her and Hannah. There was a letter that ended with a paragraph of invective about a priest who was lecturing on medieval philosophy. He was arrogant, supercilious and never listened to what anybody else said. Fierce intelligence and blind faith. Didn’t the first mean you shouldn’t be a prisoner of the second? How could you argue with someone whose ideas admitted no doubt? In the letters that followed, her irritation with the man she started to refer to jokingly as ‘John’ was replaced by an admiration that was already about something else altogether. She had done more than find his doubts.

He came to the pub with us. I don’t know why. He never did before. I started arguing with him, mostly about how his lectures infuriated me. But he wasn’t as stuffy as the stuff he spouts. I don’t mean he doesn’t believe things I could never believe, but he was so much sharper and funnier than in college. He’s full of questions about what he believes after all. He’s obviously committed to being a priest, but he said he wasn’t sure he would have become one, if he’d thought the way he thinks now. Anyway, we ended up talking on our own, after the others all went. And when the pub closed we walked round Dublin for hours and hours, just talking and talking. I think he’s probably a bit of a mess underneath. I quite like that really!

Soon the world of the family and friends Hannah and Susan shared had almost disappeared from the letters; so too had the references to what Hannah’s letters must have contained about her life in Palestine. Stefan was very aware of that. He found himself scanning the later letters, not for the pieces of the jigsaw he was actually meant to be putting together, but for the pieces of the other one, the one that was about Hannah Rosen. Sometimes there was still a glimpse of that, buried among her friend’s preoccupations.

When I met John tonight we didn’t talk very much. We finally did what we’d both wanted to do at the end of that first night, when we walked through Dublin. You always tell me I use the word love too easily. You don’t even like using it when you’re talking about Benny, and you’re marrying him! Tell me which of us is the more confused? Anyway, I’ll pretend I’m not talking about love even if I am. You’re the only person I can say all this to. I quite like how secretive and exciting it all is. Sounds a bit daft of course. I know you’ll think so! But then you’ve got a nation to build. You’ve got to be serious. I don’t suppose it’ll last long – after all he is a priest! It’ll get a lot less exciting once guilt catches up with him. But just now he hasn’t got time!

As the letters went on they were less and less about excitement and more about unhappiness and isolation – from her family and her community, even from the friends she had at UCD. It seemed to Stefan as if some of the things Susan said suggested that Hannah reciprocated those feelings at times – not of unhappiness perhaps, but at least of uncertainty. Soon, however, there was scarcely any room in Susan Field’s letters for anybody else, even her best friend. And then, in middle of it all, she found out she was pregnant.

Well, I told him. He started on about leaving the priesthood and meeting his obligations. God, the only thing worse than the mess I’m in is the thought of a lifetime with a man who’s ‘meeting his obligations’. I just shut him up, but then he surprised me. He asked me if I wanted to keep the baby, and when I told him I didn’t, he said he’d help. There’s a man in Merrion Square, a proper doctor I think, German, all very private and swanky. He knows somebody John knows. I don’t know how. I can’t say I care. I’ve seen him and it’s all very easy. It’ll be sorted out next week. John and I won’t see each other again. He’s leaving UCD. It seems a long time since we felt happy with each other. I’m not sure we ever did, whatever we told ourselves.

The last two letters were much shorter. The animation that had filled the others, even when she was writing about unhappiness, had been drained out of her. There was only emptiness. Now she just wanted it over with.

Merrion Square tomorrow. I don’t know what then. It was all about nothing in the end. In between I seem to have lost touch with all the things I cared about. I can’t even remember what they were. I’m a long way from everyone. I wish you were closer, Hannah. I suppose the blues are inevitable. But they’ll go, I guess. By the way, if I use the word love too much, you don’t use it enough. If you don’t love Benny, then making the desert bloom and filling it with babies won’t be enough. I don’t know so much about myself any more, but I know that about you. Anyway, here I go!

That was the final letter. It was dated the twenty-fifth of July. The end was bleaker than Hannah had made it sound. He knew what darkness was, and he could feel it in Susan Field’s final letter. There was a time when he had thought about walking away from it all. In Ireland the boat to somewhere was always an option; for some it offered new hope, for others it was the final expression of despair. He had even thought about another journey once, the darkest journey. For the Greeks you took a boat for that one too. It had been no more than a thought that he left behind. He had his son Tom to pull him out. What did Susan Field have? In that last letter it didn’t feel like very much.

6. Kilranelagh Hill

As the train pulled into the station at Baltinglass it followed the road and the River Slaney, black now under still thickening cloud. Beyond the river, Baltinglass Hill rose up above the town, a great pyramid of green. Three thousand years ago the people who lived there had buried their dead on its slopes and had looked down from the stone fort at the summit, as a new people arrived. The newcomers had probably followed the river too. And then the people who watched from the fort were gone, even the words of their language had disappeared, unremembered for thousands of years. They left only the ring of stones on the hilltop and the megaliths that once covered their dead.

Stefan put Susan Field’s letters into the inside pocket of his overcoat. He looked across the river at the hill he had climbed so many times as a boy, and at the ruins of the abbey that had stood below it for a thousand years, sitting next to the small Church of Ireland church that had replaced it. The abbey was not quite forgotten, but it was another place of tumbled stones and unremembered words; it was where the dead were buried now, his grandparents and his great-grandparents among them. The train juddered to a halt with the grinding of steel on steel and a long, weary hiss of steam.

In front of the wooden station buildings, a tall, bearded man in his sixties stood on the platform. Next to him, tense with anticipation, his eyes fixed on the train, was a boy of four. The old man had Stefan Gillespie’s dark eyes and so had the boy. David Gillespie and his grandson Tom waited, and then Tom ran forward as a carriage door opened and his father got out. Stefan folded his son into his arms and lifted him up, laughing, for no reason other than that Tom was laughing, with the simple happiness of seeing him.

‘Jesus, you’re a weight, Tom Gillespie! What’s Oma feeding you?’

‘Will you carry me then?’

‘I will not!’ But he carried him a little way along the platform anyway, till they reached David. Inevitably Stefan’s father was looking quizzically at his face and the evidence of the beating. ‘And I’d a run in with a feller before you say anything else about it. It’s nothing but bruises so.’

‘Did you lock him up, Daddy?’ asked Tom, impressed.

‘Well, not exactly. It was sorted out.’ He laughed. His father just nodded, suspecting there was more to it than nothing but bruises, but he asked no questions. It was clear Stefan wouldn’t be saying any more.

‘Tom was at Mass with the Lawlors. He wanted to stay and walk back with you. And I fancied a bit of a walk myself. We had nothing better to do, did we, Tom?’ It was a two-mile walk from the farm on the saddle of land behind Baltinglass Hill and another two back up again.

Tom took his father’s hand as they walked to the road.

‘Is the trike in the window at Clery’s still, the way you told me?’

‘When did I tell you that?’

‘You told me last week, and the week before.’

‘And the week before, ever since you saw the picture in the paper.’

‘Is it there though?’

‘I’d say it is.’

‘Do you look every day?’

‘I maybe miss the odd one.’

The town began just beyond the station. The buildings closed in on either side of the road and shut out the fields along the River Slaney; the blank, stone walls of the mill on one side and low two-storey houses and shops on the other. As they crossed over the bridge the water from the mill race made the river noisier and more urgent, though as it spilled out on the other side it resumed its leisurely course. Again the hill rose up, this time over the wide main street. Here some of the buildings were higher; the bank, the solicitor’s. There were occasional splashes of colour on the rendered fronts of the small-windowed shops and houses, but mostly they were grey, and mostly the grey plaster was crumbling. In the square, next to the statue of Sam MacAllister, who had died in the hills beyond the town in the last days of the rebellion of 1798, was a Christmas tree, yet to be decorated. Beyond the square was the Catholic church. It marked the eastern end of the town as the abbey ruins did the western. But the business of the churches was done for this Sunday. As grandfather, father and son walked through Baltinglass a Sunday silence hung over it. The shops were shut. And for those who were not at home, the pubs – as was their way – were curtained and shuttered, looking in on themselves, and not out on the world.

They were soon through the town and among the fields again, walking away from the river now and beginning the climb to Kilranelagh Hill and the farm that had belonged to Stefan’s grandfather; where his own father had been born, and where David had returned when the Dublin Metropolitan Police had become, inescapably, part of a war that he wanted no part in. They talked about the sow that had farrowed last week and the six new piglets in the sty, and the geese being fattened for the Christmas market, and the one they’d picked out, the fattest one of all, that they’d eat themselves. They talked about the calf that was ill with scour that Tom had prayed wouldn’t die – it was better now and out in the orchard field with its mother, though she still hadn’t the milk for it and Tom was giving the calf the bottle himself. There was the window that Tom didn’t want to talk about at all, that he and Harry Lawlor had smashed, knocking tin cans over with Harry’s catapult. There was the book Opa was reading him now, about Eeyore and Piglet and Winnie the Pooh, and there was the rhyme he could sing from it to a tune Oma had made up on the piano. They always used the German words for grandmother and grandfather; the other grandparents, Maeve’s mother and father, were Grandma and Grandpa, but Stefan’s mother and father were always Oma and Opa, just as his mother’s parents had been to him. They talked about the speckled hen Oma was cooking for the dinner, the one Opa had to kill after Tess the sheepdog chased it into the hay barn and it broke its leg. And they talked for the fourth time and the fifth time about the tricycle in the window of Clery’s department store in O’Connell Street, with a trunk behind you could put things in, that Tom had seen the picture of in the newspaper. He’d cut the picture out and put it by his bed, next to the photograph of his mother and father and his collection of books and stones and tin soldiers. It had been on three lists he’d sent up the chimney, despite warnings that it wasn’t a good idea to overdo it with Santy.

There was a steep track into the farmyard from the road up to Kilranelagh Hill. There was the smell of dung and hay. A long stone barn stretched towards the house on one side of the yard. They heard the sound of the cows inside, calling for food. On the other side of the yard stood a rusty, corrugated shed, full of straw. Quite suddenly, something black and white hurtled through the barn door, barking and snarling furiously. Tess stopped at Stefan’s feet. She looked up at him and abruptly turned away, trotting back into the barn with just one backward glance to tell him that her job, a quite unnecessary job as it happened, had been done. Then as Tom opened the door to the kitchen there was the smell of the dinner. Stefan walked across the room and put his arms round his mother. Tom held up the paper bag his father had brought and took out the loaf of bread that was in it.

‘We’ve got some bread for you, Oma, some special bread!’

Helena stared at her son’s battered face. He put his finger to his lips.

‘It’s from Weinrouk’s. Do you remember it? I’m sure it’s still Mr Moiselle who makes it. Remember? When did you last have a loaf like that, Ma?’ She smiled. She remembered very well. She had more to say, about the bruises, but that would have to wait. She looked back down at the pots on the stove. She spoke quietly, not wanting to let her concern show to Tom.

‘Father Carey’s here. He’s been waiting.’

The sitting room was dark. It looked out on to the farmyard through a window that let little enough light in on a summer’s day. Now the clouds were black over the farm and over Kilranelagh Hill above. It wasn’t a small room, but it was lined with bookshelves that crowded the heavy furniture into the centre. The priest was by the fireplace, crouching down, almost on his knees, pulling out a book. He rose as Stefan Gillespie entered the room.

‘You wanted to see me.’

Normally the word ‘Father’ would have been added to this, and in a man he liked Stefan would have had no problem with that polite expression of respect, even though Anthony Carey was barely two years older. But there was neither liking nor respect, and the feeling was thoroughly reciprocated in the cold and cautious eye the priest cast in his direction.

‘It’s about the boy.’ No name, just the boy.

‘You’d better sit down.’

The priest made no attempt to sit down. Instead he walked to a table at one side of the room where he had made a neat pile of the books he had already taken from the shelves. He put the one he was holding on top of the pile. Then he noticed the bruises on Stefan’s face. He gave a sour grin.

‘A rough night, Sergeant?’

‘A rough customer. I do meet them in my job.’ The reply was curt. He had no intention of explaining himself. He waited for the priest to continue.

‘It’s about his schooling,’ said Father Carey, businesslike now. He had a thin, angular body and somehow his voice had the same spiky quality.

‘We’ve already talked about that,’ replied Stefan shortly.

‘I felt he should begin school at St Tegan’s this September, you remember I’m sure. You weren’t happy about that at the time of course.’

‘I didn’t think he was ready. He’d have been the youngest one starting. He’s still only four. He’ll go next year. I don’t see there’s a hurry.’

‘The particular circumstances –’

‘I thought this was settled. I spoke to Father MacGuire –’

‘I was away then.’ Father Carey smiled.

The smile expressed what both men knew – that Stefan had chosen to speak to the parish priest when the curate was away, precisely because he was. Father MacGuire was an older, gentler, easier man altogether.

‘I have now taken over from Father MacGuire as chairman of the school’s board of management. It’s a lot of work for the parish priest. We both felt that I would have more time and energy to devote to it.’

‘The school year’s begun now anyway. There’s a term gone.’

‘My feeling – my strong feeling – is that Tom should be at school.’

‘Next year he will be.’

‘As I’ve said, the particular circumstances really do argue against that, Sergeant Gillespie, as far as the Church is concerned. He is a Catholic living in a home that is not Catholic. I have a responsibility to ensure that he does not suffer in a situation that is, from the Church’s point of view, extremely unsatisfactory. The lack of a Catholic home makes his presence in a Catholic school all the more imperative. He should start after Christmas.’

‘He’s very young. He’s still – after his mother’s death –’

‘Your wife has been dead for two years. It’s hardly a reason for the boy not to go to school. In fact it’s her absence, the absence of a Catholic mother, that makes it all the more important that he does go and go now.’

‘He goes to Mass every Sunday with the Lawlors.’ There was nothing to be gained from telling the curate that Tom’s mother had no time for the Church at all. It was a mixed marriage, and in order to be married they had to agree that their children would be brought up as Catholics. That was simply how it was. Death did not release Stefan from the contract. But the easy, familiar way the priest threw Maeve into the conversation, a woman he hadn’t known, was about more than that. He knew it irritated Stefan, and it did now. Stefan said nothing, struggling to hold his temper.

‘I’ve never been in here before.’ It was an abrupt change of subject. Father Carey looked round the room at the crowded bookshelves with a mixture of amusement and contempt. ‘You’re quite the reader so,’ he said.

‘Is there something wrong with that?’

‘I’ve been looking at your … library.’ The final word was said with a patronising smile, but he was serious. ‘I’m not easily shocked, Mr Gillespie.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m not with you.’

‘This is in German,’ he announced, picking up the book that was on top of the pile with a look of distaste. ‘But not hard to decipher, even for me. Isn’t it The Communist Manifesto? Would I be right about that?’

‘It was my grandfather’s. He studied philosophy, at university in Munich. All his books are here. And why wouldn’t they be?’ Stefan knew the priest was going to test his temper in every way he could. He was already angry, angry with himself as well as Carey. He was explaining away the presence of a book instead of telling the priest to get out of the house.

Father Carey put down the book and frowned at the rest of the pile.

‘Voltaire, Hobbes, Locke, Darwin, Martin Luther. I’ve picked these out. I’m sure there are others. All these are on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum. As a great reader, I hope you’ll know what that is.’ The words continued to express disdain for the idea of Stefan reading anything at all.

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