Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

‘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.’