Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

When Stefan came out of the Mater on to Eccles Street, Dessie MacMahon was there, waiting for him in the black Austin. A body had been found in the Dublin Mountains. The State Pathologist was already on his way there.

‘Do we know what they’ve got?’

‘Bones, that’s all Mr Wayland-Smith said. Oh, and she was in, looking for you. About an hour ago.’ He didn’t need to be more specific.

‘What did she want?’

‘She left a couple of books. And there’s a note.’

Dessie reached over to the back seat as he pulled out into the traffic.

‘Drive, Dessie! I’ll do it.’ Stefan lifted up two thick, heavy volumes. One was still quite new; the other was well-used and thoroughly dog-eared.

‘She was a while writing the note. I didn’t read it,’ grinned Dessie.

‘If we want to get to this body alive you’d be better looking where you’re going,’ snapped Stefan. As Dessie drove on, whistling quietly in amusement, he unfolded the note that was tucked into one of the books.

Just back from Mr Field’s. The only thing that struck me were Susan’s books, well, she never read much when we were at school. Most of them were for her UCD course. But look at what’s written at the front of these.

He registered the title of the first book as he opened it, The Dawn of Modern Thought: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz ; on the flyleaf was a name, a place, and a date, ‘Francis Byrne, Pontifical University, Maynooth, 1932’. The other book was The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France. Inside, on the flyleaf, in the same handwriting was written, ‘Read it and give it a chance, your good friend Francis’. He didn’t think either book would impress Father Anthony Carey very much. He looked back at Hannah Rosen’s note.

I called in at the UCD office in Earlsfort Terrace this morning, asking about courses. I mentioned Francis Byrne. He turns out to be Father Francis Byrne, a lecturer in medieval philosophy last year. He left UCD about six months ago. The woman said she thought he’d gone abroad somewhere.

Stefan was both pleased and irritated. Hannah couldn’t walk around Dublin questioning people as if she was still barging into Hugo Keller’s clinic. But she had found something, a new place to start. The priest was that place.

All night the rain had poured down the wooded slopes of Kilmashogue, already sodden with weeks of wet weather. On a bend in the steep road up into the Dublin Mountains, where the embankment had been weakened by the felling of trees, it had collapsed part of the hillside and thick, sticky mud was blocking the track. The body had been found by a dog belonging to one of the workmen who had come up in a tractor to clear the road. The soil that had covered the shallow grave had been washed away in the landslide and the body with it. Now there was only a cold drizzle. They were standing in the low cloud that covered the mountain. On a fine day you saw the whole of Dublin laid out below and the sea beyond, stretching away to meet the sky. Today there was only the wet mist and the pile of earth across the road and, just above it, something almost indistinguishable from the black earth that Wayland-Smith was scraping at as he knelt in the mud. Detective Sergeant Gillespie and Garda MacMahon stood over him. A little way off two gardai were smoking with the workmen who had discovered the body. The dog, tied to the tractor now, whined and barked intermittently, his only thought how to get back to the bones that had been so rudely dragged away from him. Wayland-Smith was scraping at a skull now, the eye sockets packed with soil. Other bones were visible just below it. Three ribs stood out — they were the colour of the wet earth, brown and yellow and black.

‘It’s hard to say how old. There’s a lot of peat, which would keep things fresh for longer. It’s quite well preserved in parts. There’s even some skin coverage in places. And there’s some hair on the skull.’ He leant forward, using a trowel to prise what looked like more mud from the body. ‘As well as several pieces of clothing that haven’t really broken down yet.’

‘So not that long?’

‘Two to five years. No longer than seven. Male I think.’

‘Any idea of his age?’

‘Adult clearly, but not old, twenty or thirty from the teeth.’

‘He’s a mess.’

‘Quite an unusual one.’

‘Why?’

‘The bones didn’t get like that lying here. It looks as if someone took a sledgehammer to them. So the question is, was that before or after he died?’

Three wet hours at Kilmashogue produced nothing more. The bones were scraped and dug out of the hillside, wrapped in sacking and loaded on to the workman’s trailer to be brought to the morgue. Dessie drove the Austin back into town, while Stefan went with Wayland-Smith in his shooting brake. There was little to say about the body. There was no obvious means of identification yet, though the discovery of a wallet where a trouser pocket had once been offered some hope. There was also a small round hole in the skull, close to the temple, which suggested a bullet.

It was what they might have expected. Nobody looked for bodies in the mountains, but they were there, from the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed. IRA men executed by the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s G Division; informers executed by the IRA; victims of the Black and Tans; landowners shot for being too English and farm workers shot for being too Irish; anti-Treaty IRA men dragged into the night by pro-Treaty IRA men and pro-Treaty IRA men killed by old comrades; and in the midst of all that self-righteous, brutal murder not a few who were on the wrong end of old scores dressed up as something to sing about in years to come. These were the bodies most people preferred to forget about, bodies no one in the Irish Free State really wanted to find, let alone the Garda Siochana.

If the body at Kilmashogue looked like one of those there would be a slim file and no further investigation. They would know when Wayland-Smith had finished the post-mortem, but that wasn’t why Stefan was sitting in the estate that always smelt of fish. It was the doctor’s role as a lecturer in the medical faculty at University College Dublin that interested him. The doctor’s reputation as a pathologist was exceeded only by his reputation as a man who knew everybody who was anybody, especially in the academic world. He was a snob, but that made him a walking Who’s Who of Ireland.

‘I’m looking for a priest,’ said Stefan quietly.

‘Are they hard to find on our isle of saints and scholars?’

‘As it happens it’s the scholarly element I’m interested in.’

‘I wouldn’t leap to any metaphysical conclusions about our body.’

‘I’m looking for a priest who’s teaching at UCD.’

‘You won’t find many in my faculty. Medicine’s not a strong point.’

‘But you know who’s who.’

‘Do I want to know why you’re asking me this, Sergeant?’

‘How often would students encounter priests in the university?’

‘Where do you want to start? We’ve got a selection of bishops and monsignors on the senate, some admirable, some excruciating. There are various senior figures in the faculties; and the chaplains of course.’

‘He’d be lecturing in philosophy,’ continued Stefan.

‘Metaphysics without God, mumbo without jumbo.’

‘Thirties or forties. Not older.’

‘The fact that a priest might be lecturing doesn’t mean he’s on the staff. He could be coming in from Maynooth, or a seminary, especially if it’s the kind of philosophy that counts the number of angels on an Irish pinhead.’

‘I think he might be interested in something more modern.’