Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

James Donaldson would go a long way to avoid a conversation about the Civil War or the IRA, but a death you couldn’t investigate because of ‘all that’ was in many ways preferable to a murder you had no choice but to investigate. Whenever he couldn’t get a straight answer out of Stefan Gillespie it usually meant trouble. He could smell it now. The kind of trouble his detective sergeant brought into the station like old dog shit on his shoes.

The black mottled bones had been laid out like an archaeological exhibit in a museum, on the white marble slab at the centre of the big room in the mortuary. The scent of carbolic didn’t altogether hide the reek of putrefaction that was not just in the air but in walls and floor and ceiling. It got you as you walked through the doors, a strange sweetness that caught at the back of your throat. The State Pathologist stood over the skeleton they had brought back from the mountainside, with an expression of almost tender concern. He spoke, as always, in the businesslike, dismissive tone that seemed to imply this was a job and nothing more, but his eyes showed something else. Two things in fact; that the dead mattered and that he would enjoy telling Detective Sergeant Gillespie everything he had found out.

‘A young man, in his twenties or thirties; nothing to contradict my judgement there.’ Wayland-Smith walked slowly round the slab. ‘A number of broken bones. Now he’s been scrubbed up rather more broken bones than I counted up at Kilmashogue. You’ll see the left arm, multiple fracture of the humerus; broken ribs here and here, along with the sternum; in both legs, femur left, tibia right. He has suffered severe trauma. The fractures indicate it happened quickly, and with some force. A fall from a considerable height or, more likely, something hit him. The injuries would be consistent with a traffic accident for instance.’

‘And that’s what killed him?’

‘It was certainly enough to result in death. But I can’t say it did.’

‘And what about this hole in the skull?’

Wayland-Smith smiled. It was the question he was waiting for.

‘Certainly not a bullet. I didn’t think so.’ The words ‘of course’ hovered in the air. ‘It could have happened during the accident, collision, whatever we choose to call it. Maybe something sharp, a protruding metal spike, narrow in diameter, hammered into his head by the force of impact.’

‘Which might have killed him?’

‘Again I can only say something of that sort would have had the potential to. With no soft tissue and no exit on the other side of the skull I can’t know how far the projectile went into his brain. I don’t much like the idea anyway.’ He peered down at the hole. ‘And it still seems remarkably neat, don’t you think, if we’re talking about smashing and hammering? There’s nothing about it that strikes you as in any way familiar, Sergeant?’

‘You mean you know what it is and I should know too?’

‘Doesn’t your family have a farm?’

Stefan nodded and waited. Wayland-Smith enjoyed these moments.

‘I’m sure you’ve seen the butcher arrive to stick the pig.’

He turned and walked to a table close by. He picked up a heavy pistol, wood and grey metal, square and clumsy. Stefan was puzzled by the weapon; it looked like something that had been cobbled together from other guns, but as the State Pathologist held it up he recognised what it was.

‘A Messrs Accles and Shelvoke captive bolt pistol,’ proclaimed Wayland-Smith. ‘Not a pretty thing. I borrowed it from the slaughterhouse which is, in the absence of cadavers, the source of carcasses, usually pigs, for my anatomy students. The skulls always come with a neat, round hole, where the animal has been, as we like to say — to show what nice fellers we all are — humanely stunned before slaughter. Now, if we take a pig’s head — ’

In a gesture that was unashamedly theatrical, he picked up a piece of oilcloth to reveal a pink pig’s head, sitting on a large white plate; it only needed an apple in its mouth to go into an oven. He cocked the pistol and held it to the pink, bristly skin, just above the eyes, and fired. The blank cartridge discharged violently in the echoing mortuary; there was the smell of cordite. They were both deafened for several seconds. ‘There are pistols that operate by means of compressed air,’ shouted Wayland-Smith. ‘It’s all I could find, I’m afraid.’ He put down the pistol and pointed at a small hole. ‘Remove the flesh and we’d have a match for the hole in our friend’s skull.’

‘Which may or may not be the cause of death,’ said Stefan.

‘Yes. The function of the gun is to render an animal unconscious so that its throat can be cut for bleeding. I don’t know if that killed him. But between whatever smashed into him and the bolt from the stunner piercing his brain, we can at least say death couldn’t have come as a great surprise.’

‘So when did it happen?’

‘1932. Some time in June or July.’

‘Now you’re showing off.’ Stefan hadn’t expected that much.

Wayland-Smith gestured at several dark shapes sitting on a sheet of white paper. Beside them were the remains of the dead man’s leather wallet.

‘I’ve cut open the wallet. There are several pieces of what was originally paper. Naturally most of it has perished, but the conditions have preserved some things rather well. I’ve done as much as I can to clean up the scraps and dry them out; much more and we’d simply destroy the things. There’s a little corner of a ten shilling note. It might get you some sort of date if you can find a serial number, but not terribly useful unless it was a new note. Some of the paper has simply congealed into papier mache. You won’t do much with that. And then there’s this, which I think has two clearly discernible words, if you look here, and part of a date as well, just here.’

He handed across a magnifying glass and Stefan bent over the scrap of blackened paper. After a moment he could make out some letters and what looked like a number, all slightly darker than the surrounding brown.

‘It’s a three, or an eight?’

‘One or the other I think.’

‘And that has to be July, doesn’t it? But no year.’

Wayland-Smith shrugged cheerfully and pointed. He had more.

‘Do you think that says “the word” or “the world”? I’d go for “world”.’

‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ said Stefan, smiling slowly as he looked up at the State Pathologist. It was his turn now. ‘ The Way of the World .’

‘What do you mean, Sergeant?’

‘William Congreve. I saw it at the Gate, a couple of years ago. I suppose it would have been summer. It’s July thirty-two. A theatre ticket.’

Dessie MacMahon heaped a third spoonful of sugar into a steaming cup.

‘Jesus, you’d want to keep your back to the wall in that place!’

‘But your virtue’s intact.’

‘Sure that’d be telling!’ Dessie grinned and gulped the tea. It had been his first visit to the Gate Theatre. Even if he’d got no further than the box office and front of house manager, its exotic reputation could not go unremarked. Closer examination of the ticket in the dead man’s wallet had confirmed the date and the name of the play. It had also revealed a seat number.

‘They thought I was joking them when I wanted to know who’d bought a ticket for a play two years ago. This front of house feller, Sinclair, was rolling his eyes at the woman in the box office like I was an eejit straight from the eejits’ home.’ Dessie grinned and drank some of the tea.

‘But?’ asked Stefan.

‘Hmm?’

‘There’s a but.’

‘The date on the ticket wasn’t any old date, Sarge. It was the first night.’ He was pleased with himself. ‘When they put the thing on after — ’