Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

Stefan nodded.

‘Sometimes it was easier being with people I didn’t really know.’

‘That’s not what I meant, Stefan.’

He was aware it was the first time she had called him that.

‘It doesn’t feel like I don’t know you.’

Stefan reached out and took her hand. She held his hand tightly.

‘It doesn’t for me either. It hasn’t from the first time we met.’

‘Time, please! Let’s have you two out of here!’ The barman’s voice boomed across the room in their direction. The glasses were rapidly snatched off the table. They looked round, laughing. The bar had been full when they came in two hours earlier. Now they were the only people left.

As they walked out of the pub towards Grafton Street it was bitterly cold. The long street of Christmas shop windows was almost empty now.

‘Do you want to get a taxi, Hannah?’

He was already turning towards Stephen’s Green and the taxi rank.

‘No.’

‘I’ll walk home with you then.’

‘I don’t think I’ll go home,’ she replied quietly, gently, her eyes fixed on his. She was shivering. She put her arm through his, pulling herself closer to him. It was not what he expected, but it wouldn’t be true to say he hadn’t thought about it, and suddenly it seemed not unexpected at all. Perhaps it had been clear from the beginning, to both of them, and now there was a need for comfort that had pushed away all the reasons why it wouldn’t happen. There was nothing they needed to say to each other. They turned away from Stephen’s Green and walked on, down towards Nassau Street.

The next morning Stefan Gillespie took the train to Carlow Town. It was a journey to a familiar place; the nearest big town to Baltinglass. Until Naas, the railway followed the route he took going home, but where the line branched away towards the Wicklow Mountains, he carried on now to Kildare Town and the flat plain of the Curragh and down into the neat pastureland of County Carlow. He fixed his mind on the day’s work, but it wasn’t easy. It was one thing to tell himself he expected nothing from Hannah after the night they’d spent together; it was another to believe it.

Her mood had been very different that morning. The questions about Susan’s murder had come faster than his answers. Why was he holding things back? Why was he trawling the streets of Dublin when he should be on the boat to England by now, across the Channel, and on a train to Danzig? Wasn’t it the priest he needed to question about Susan above everything else? And he knew it was. He also knew why nobody, from the Garda Commissioner down, would be rushing to buy his train ticket. He was investigating the deaths of a woman and a man that a lot of people, his superiors among them, would rather had lain undiscovered on the mountainside at Kilmashogue. Then, quite abruptly, the questions had stopped. She had to go. She walked across to him and kissed him. She rested her head on his shoulder. It was an expression of support, and something more, of tenderness. And then the room was very empty. She was gone.

As Stefan looked out from the train at the green fields of Carlow, Hannah Rosen was making tea in Brian Field’s kitchen, steeling herself for a long day talking to all the people who would come through his door. But in her head there was another conversation going on. Lying in Stefan’s bed that morning, before he woke up, listening to the sounds of Dublin outside, she knew how much this was still her city. The ease she felt with Stefan, even in the face of her best friend’s death, went deeper than she wanted to admit. She could never tell Benny what she was feeling, and not only because of what had happened between her and Stefan. He would be hurt by that, but he would understand. What he wouldn’t understand were her thoughts as she listened to Dublin, rattling and clattering and cursing beyond the window of the scruffy room in Nassau Street. The creation of Israel drove Benny Jacobson with a relentless passion that left no space for sentimental attachments to the past. And she was full of those attachments now. That was the betrayal he wouldn’t forgive. This was still where she belonged. Her head had made a decision about what her life should be; her heart had not.

Stefan went straight from Carlow Station to the Garda barracks in Tullow Street to pay his respects to Superintendent Flynn, who wanted to be remembered to his father and seemed in quite the mood to settle down for a chat about country policing and metropolitan crime. That is until he got the whiff of unnatural practices in his nostrils and found his presence elsewhere was more urgently required than anticipated. Stefan would want to talk to the parents, of course. Wouldn’t it be best if he got on with it? He knew the town like the back of his hand — there was no need for the superintendent’s officers to get involved, was there? Stefan just smiled. No, there wasn’t.

He walked the length of Tullow Street and turned into Dublin Street at the bottom. The tobacconist’s was on the left. He remembered it, but when he walked inside the memory was much stronger. The smell of the place, a comfortable smell of sweetness and smoke reminded him of his grandfather. He had bought Christmas presents for him there, a half ounce of tobacco, some pipe cleaners. But the moment Mr Walsh showed him through the shop into the living room behind it, the warmth was gone. There was only empty space, somehow not quite filled by the table and the two wooden chairs, the two-seater settee and the armchair, and the heavy mahogany sideboard that was too big for the room. It was a dark room and although the day was cold, there was no fire in the grate. There was a photograph of a wedding on the mantelpiece — Mr and Mrs Walsh’s — and on either side of it were oval framed photographs of two couples who must have been Vincent’s grandparents. Above the fireplace too was a black-framed picture of the Sacred Heart. ‘Blessed be the home in which my heart is exposed.’

Somehow it felt less like a home than the shop had. That was where they spoke to people. Stefan could feel that when Mr and Mrs Walsh walked back through the door from the tobacconist’s there weren’t many words. No one ever said much in this room. He learned that Vincent had been their only child, yet there was no photograph; when he asked for one they looked at each other uncertainly, as if they weren’t sure where to find such a thing. Mrs Walsh made no move. A slight nod of her head gave her husband permission to act.

He went to the sideboard and opened a door, with the key that was in the lock. The lock was stiff; the door was rarely opened. He took out a biscuit tin with a picture of the Rock of Cashel on the lid. He opened it carefully and looked through the contents, hunched over the sideboard. He produced a small cardboard frame with a photograph in it; R amp; F Beard, Photographers, Tullow Street, Carlow. It was a picture of a young man of sixteen or seventeen. He wore a dark suit jacket, a white collar that was too big for him, and a striped tie. He wasn’t smiling. There was a similar photograph of Stefan on the wall in the kitchen at Kilranelagh. He had gone to the photographer’s shop in Tullow Street the summer before he started at Trinity College; his mother wanted a photograph of him in the dark suit that looked so much like Vincent Walsh’s. He had sat in the same chair, in front of the same stained sheet in Mr Beard’s studio. Mr Beard would have said the same things and made the same jokes. Stefan promised he would return the photograph as soon as he could. Mr and Mrs Walsh didn’t reply.

His questions were answered with as few words as were needed. They had not seen their son for over three years. He had left home to work in Dublin in the summer of 1930. He had come home twice. The last time had been Christmas, 1931. He went back to Dublin that Stephen’s Day and it was the last contact they’d had with him. There was nothing to find out here. They could have understood nothing of their son’s life. They knew just enough to ensure it was never spoken about. Stefan could almost feel, through the years between, the long silence that final Christmas must have been for all three of them. As he walked from the shop out into the street, it was as if the ghost of that Stephen’s Day past, when Vincent Walsh had left his home for the last time, still hovered in the tobacconist’s doorway. Whatever the shop had meant to Vincent then, once it must have held the sounds and scents and images of a childhood that wasn’t always silent and empty and cold.