Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

‘One of them was a tall, fair-haired feller?’

Dessie’s lips tightened round the cigarette. He drew the smoke deeper into his lungs. The pleasure of being one up on his sergeant was short-lived.

‘He was watching us at the Shelbourne. I don’t know the other one.’

‘Who are they?’ Dessie waited for an explanation. It didn’t come.

‘I couldn’t tell you what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. Let’s say they’re freelancers. What did you find out about Keller’s nurse?’

‘She’s a couple of rooms off Dorset Street, but when I was in O’Donaghue’s for that pint the little dark feller, Max he calls himself, reckoned Sheila Hogan spent much more time here. She’d be in the pub with Keller a lot, always at it they were, arguing, the two of them. Then back here to make up. That’s only Max’s opinion and the man’s a hoor for the gossip.’

Stefan walked to a table that stood at one side of the bed. Papers were piled up on it. There were tumblers and empty beer bottles, and an ashtray heaped with cigarette ends. There was a small mirror, and next to it a brush and a comb and a powder compact. It was a makeshift dressing table. He opened the drawer and took out a pair of crumpled silk stockings.

‘She wouldn’t buy those on what he paid her, not as a nurse anyway.’

‘Beat me to it again, Sarge. Will we talk to her, then?’

‘Where is she now? Dorset Street?’ Stefan asked.

Dessie smiled, stubbing his cigarette out, finally ahead of the game.

‘She’s in the Mater Hospital. It seems she fell down the stairs.’

Sheila Hogan’s face was swollen and bruised; her arm was in plaster. She was propped up on pillows in a ward full of women who were a lot older than her; most of them without the strength or the desire to do anything other than lie flat. Mixed with the smell of hospital antiseptic was the smell of old age. As Stefan Gillespie approached the bed the first thing he saw in the nurse’s eyes was fear. It wasn’t just any fear; it was the fear that he was going to hit her, there and then, lying in the hospital bed. She already knew he was a guard before she recognised him from the raid at Merrion Square. He could see it was that way round. Nobody was born with the instinct to spot a policeman and know what he was. You needed a reason to learn that.

She said nothing as he introduced himself again.

‘I need to ask you some questions.’

‘How many more answers do you want?’

‘I didn’t have a chance to get any before.’

‘Didn’t your friends tell you what I said?’

‘You mean Sergeant Lynch. You’ve been talking to him then?’

She didn’t reply, but he knew who’d put her in hospital.

‘That’d be before you fell down the stairs, would it? Just before.’

There was something else in her eyes now; defiance, contempt.

‘Did he find what he was looking for?’

‘You’d be better asking him.’

‘You know Hugo Keller’s gone? Germany probably.’

‘I wouldn’t blame him. If I had somewhere to go, I’d go myself.’

‘Come on, Sheila. You were playing doctors and nurses in more ways than one in Merrion Square. I know there’s fellers who keep stockings and knickers by their beds, but I wouldn’t have put Hugo down for that game.’

‘Maybe he’d surprise you.’

‘Did he tell you he was going?’ asked Stefan.

‘What’s it to you?’

‘Not a lot. But then it wasn’t much to him. You, I mean. He didn’t stop by on the way to the boat to pick you up, Sheila. He’d have been sitting down for a beer on board I’d say, about the time you fell down the stairs.’

‘With a bit of luck it choked him.’

‘He didn’t even say goodbye then?’

‘This is the only goodbye I got.’ She lifted her plastered arm and gestured at her battered, blackened face as best she could.

‘We’ve got something in common then. Sergeant Lynch and his friend called on me too. They thought I must have taken it. I don’t know if it was a guess, or maybe it was what you told them the first time round?’

‘Is it sympathy you’re looking for, Sergeant?’

‘I don’t really know what Jimmy Lynch wants, but if I haven’t got it and you haven’t got it, maybe we’re both done with falling downstairs.’ He waited for a response. There wasn’t one, just the same look of contempt. He took the photograph of Susan Field from his pocket and held it up to her.

‘Did you ever see this woman?’

She looked at the photo and shook her head.

‘She’d have visited Keller.’

‘A lot of women did. I’d hardly remember them all.’

‘It was about five months ago.’

‘I’m not saying she didn’t. I’m saying I don’t remember her.’

‘Susan Field.’

She shook her head again.

‘I do know the name’s not in the appointments book, Sheila.’

‘You think they use their real names?’

‘The last thing we know about Susan Field is that she was going to Merrion Square, to see Hugo Keller for an abortion. She’d an appointment. The twenty-sixth of July. She hasn’t been seen since. She’s disappeared.’

‘That’s not my business. I don’t know her.’

‘How many abortions did he do in the last six months?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on! It can’t be that many.’

‘There were people he didn’t want me to see. Special.’

‘What do you mean special?’

‘It’s not hard to work out, is it? Important people, people with money, politicians from over the road in Leinster House. Bigwigs who want extra privacy. People who wouldn’t like to walk into a hospital with a dose of the clap, or let anyone know whose wife they got pregnant. Important people.’

‘I don’t think there was anything very important about Susan Field, except to the people who loved her. All they want to do is find her.’

‘Maybe she doesn’t want them to.’

Her words were cold. It didn’t tell Stefan that Sheila Hogan knew more than she was saying, but if she did it was very clear sentiment wasn’t going to open her mouth. He put the photograph back in his pocket.

‘They change their minds,’ she said. ‘They don’t always turn up.’

‘What would you think if I said the man who sent Susan Field to see Herr Keller, to get the abortion, was a priest? Would that surprise you?’

‘I wasn’t paid to be surprised.’

‘So has that happened before?’

‘You’d have to ask Mr Keller. I wasn’t paid to ask questions either.’

‘I wish he was around to ask, Sheila. He wasn’t a great talker, then?’

‘There were two things he wanted me for. The second one didn’t involve a lot of talking, not the way he did it anyway.’ There was a disdainful sneer on the nurse’s face again. It could have been for Hugo Keller, but Stefan felt it was for men in general. And he wasn’t excluded.

‘This book of Keller’s, the one Jimmy Lynch is looking for, the one neither of us knows anything about, is that what he kept in there? Names, addresses, appointments? The things he didn’t want anybody to find out?’

He threw this at her, not expecting an answer, but hoping for more than he’d got from Jimmy Lynch or Lieutenant Cavendish. Whatever the book was, it had to contain answers to some of the questions he couldn’t ask Keller face to face now. All he wanted to know was whether there was anything in it about Susan Field. But Sheila Hogan had nothing to give.

‘If I knew where it was I wouldn’t be in here, would I? You think I give a toss about anything of Hugo Keller’s? I’ve got him to thank for this. I don’t care about any fecking book or any fecking women or anybody else. He can screw himself as far as I’m concerned. If ever I saw him again it’d be to spit in his eye. If you want to take the message I can always spit in yours.’