Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

‘So show me.’

The policeman moved forward, stepping up on to the mound of earth, opening the flaps of the box. Stefan needed to shine a torch in to see. It could have been no more than earth and leaves, muddy, compressed; it could have been the carcass of a young rabbit, the fur stripped away, rotting. But the tiny skull was human. It was a foetus. Wayland-Smith crossed himself. It was a gesture Stefan didn’t expect; he was conscious that he had never seen the State Pathologist make it over any adult corpse before. He moved closer to the torso and the head of the woman, stumbling in the slippery mud. He bent down, shining the torch on to her skull. He brushed away the mud on the forehead. There was something, quite small, blacker than the blackened skin; it was a round hole. Wayland-Smith squatted down beside him.

‘She’s been dead no more than a year, maybe less.’

He took the torch from Stefan and bent nearer the head. The work of the soil had nearly removed the smell of putrefaction from the dead flesh, but this close it lingered. Stefan coughed as it hit the back of his throat. Wayland-Smith took a pencil from his pocket. He poked it into the hole.

‘I’d say so too, Sergeant. It’s our captive bolt pistol.’

In the light from the torch something glinted in the mud. It was tiny. Stefan brushed it with his finger. It glinted more. He eased it away from the wet earth. A thin black cord came with it, circling the vertebrae that were all that was left of the neck; a silver chain. What had glimmered in the torchlight was silver too, barely half an inch in size. It was a Star of David.

Detective Sergeant Gillespie sat in the Austin outside the house in Lennox Street. It smelt, as always, of Dessie MacMahon’s Sweet Afton. Usually that irritated him, if he bothered to notice it, but for now it seemed to drive out the smell of rain and soil and death that he had been breathing for the last twenty-four hours. Inside, Hannah Rosen was telling Susan Field’s father that his daughter’s body had been found. Stefan had not been on the wet plot of earth at Kilmashogue very long before he knew. It was scarcely an hour later that her handbag had been found, still full of the ordinary business of her life; comb, lipstick, pens and powder compact. There was a purse packed with shillings and pennies and threepenny bits and bus tickets, and there was a cheque book from the College Green branch of the Hibernian bank. The name inside the cheque book — still clearly legible — was Susan Field’s.

Hannah had not been surprised by the fact that her friend was dead of course. Instinct had already told her that. But the circumstances threw her back into the kind of bewildered disbelief that made acceptance hard. Faced with death, knowing is never enough, not at first. She had known but she didn’t believe. And now her heart, for a short time at least, had to fight the truth, in the futile, painful battle that can only be lost. Stefan could see it in her face; he had fought that battle once himself. He hadn’t told her everything. There was still too much he didn’t understand. Now there was more. How did the murder of Susan Field relate to the death of Vincent Walsh, dumped on the same hillside two years before, his bones broken and smashed, his head spiked like an animal in a slaughterhouse, just as Susan’s head had been spiked?

It was only a few minutes before Hannah came back out to fetch him. He went into the house. Brian Field stood by the fireplace, hands clasped tightly behind him, like the last time Stefan was there. It felt as if the cantor had been standing there all that time, knowing he would come back to say, no, she didn’t go anywhere, Mr Field; her bones are scattered on the mountainside. Stefan expressed his sorrow for the old man’s trouble, with the handshake that always accompanied those words and, as ever, when the words were said and the hand-shaking done, there was nothing else to say.

‘I should see her,’ said Brian Field very quietly.

‘She’s been in the ground a long time, Mr Field. I’m not asking you to identify your daughter now, not from the remains. It might be best — ’

‘I should see her.’ He simply repeated the words. ‘I should see her.’

‘I’ll go with you.’ Hannah put her arm through his. All at once the composure on the old man’s face was gone. There was a look of anguish.

‘Her sisters — ’

She tightened her grip on his arm.

‘We’ll telephone. Rachel can be here from London in no time.’

The cantor shook his head slowly; he didn’t want to telephone.

Stefan recognised what he saw in that anguish. He remembered it well enough. Each person you tell makes death more real; each word of telling takes away the little breath of life that still survives inside your heart.

They stood over the body as it lay on the mortuary slab. They were the only people in the building. There were no questions to ask. Not now. It was the necessary business of death. Brian Field’s fingers trembled as he took the blue kippah from his pocket. He put it on his head. He trembled again as he tried to fix it there with a hairgrip. Hannah took it from him and slid it on. He seemed unaware she was doing it. Stefan’s eyes were fixed on the hairgrip. It was exactly the same as the two lined up on his desk, with the compact and the lipstick and the purse and the pens and the comb from Susan Field’s handbag. And then quite suddenly, strong and clear, somewhere between singing and speaking, the cantor’s voice filled the mortuary. ‘Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw. Amein.’ May his name be exalted and sanctified in the highest. ‘B’allmaw deev’raw hir’usei.’ In the universe created according to his will. ‘V’yamlih malhusei b’hayeihon uv’yomeihon. Amein.’ May his kingdom swiftly come in our day and in the days of the house of Israel. Amen. As he continued, each amen was echoed more quietly by Hannah. Stefan watched her. He could feel how much it mattered to her. Sometimes you didn’t have to believe it for it to matter.

Stefan and Hannah sat in Neary’s in Chatham Street and said very little. She didn’t talk about what had happened to Susan, only about their friendship, half-remembered events, unfinished stories, times and places and people she was trying to bring back, just for a moment. Some of the time she said nothing at all and for a while he felt he had to speak. When he tried to ask her about herself, about Palestine, about what she did, where she lived, her replies didn’t tell him anything. Eventually she shook her head and laughed.

‘You don’t have to say anything when there’s nothing to say.’

‘I’m sorry. I should know that. It was always my line.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘When Maeve died, and afterwards, for ages. I couldn’t move for people talking to me. It was as if they’d organised themselves into shifts. One went and there’d be someone else. If it wasn’t my mother or father, it was a stream of neighbours, or some cousin or aunt I hadn’t seen for years. “Whatever you do, don’t leave him on his own. And keep him talking!”’

‘It’s only because people care.’

‘And Jesus, how they care! They all felt so bad about how I felt I ended up comforting them! I swear I’d never seen some of them in my life.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to say!’ she said, still smiling.

‘Sometimes people need to know when to shut up.’

‘So are you going to shut up now?’

‘If that’s what you want, Hannah.’

‘I suppose I’m running away from all that a bit.’ She was more serious again. The strain in her face couldn’t be hidden by a smile for very long. ‘All the people I know, the people we grew up with. It’s like you said. They’ll be in and out of Lennox Street tomorrow, and we’ll sit and say the same things, over and over. I will do it, of course I will. I will sit there. But not tonight.’