Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

Stefan shrugged. ‘So if something did go wrong in Keller’s clinic?’

Cavendish finished the thought in his head about Susan Field.

‘Well, he wouldn’t do better than DS Lynch to get rid of a body.’

As he walked down the steps to Fitzwilliam Place Stefan was no nearer finding Hugo Keller. And if he did find him, somewhere in Germany, no one was going to send him back to Ireland to answer any questions; certainly not the German police. But if Keller wasn’t in Ireland someone was, someone who had been working for Hugo Keller as a paid informant, and someone who also knew about the letters Vincent Walsh was carrying the night he died. There didn’t seem to be any connection between Keller and Vincent Walsh, but there was a connection between Jimmy Lynch and Keller, and between Jimmy Lynch and Walsh. If the investigation into Susan Field’s death stopped at the door to Hugo Keller’s clinic, the next door along led straight into Garda Special Branch at Dublin Castle. However, it wasn’t much more promising than the first. If no one would let him speak to a priest, what were the chances of investigating a detective in Special Branch for corruption and maybe murder? The Branch was a law unto itself within the Gardai. It was full of ex-IRA men now, whose methods reflected that, and whose strongest loyalties were to each other. You took your life in your hands taking on men like that. There was plenty of room out there in the Dublin Mountains.

The tricycle left the window of Clery’s the day before Christmas Eve. It found its way to Baltinglass on the train, via Kingsbridge and Naas, and Declan Lawlor’s horse and cart brought it up the hill to Kilranelagh. On the morning of Christmas Eve, Stefan and David and Tom cut a pine tree in the woods below the farm. That afternoon the chosen goose was eaten enthusiastically by Stefan, David and Helena and, less enthusiastically than he had expected, by Tom, who had chosen it after all. At least he made sure the bird did not go unmourned. After dinner, keeping Christmas as they always had, to the German calendar, there were the presents, and the tricycle from the newspaper cutting by Tom Gillespie’s bed was finally a real thing. He was still riding it round the farmyard in the dark when David and Helena left for the midnight Eucharist in the Church of Ireland church by the abbey, and it was dragged into the kitchen with him when he finally came inside.

Father and son sat by the range with the fire door open, and Stefan started to read the book David and Helena had given Tom, Mary Poppins , but by the time Mary had arrived with her carpetbag, Tom was asleep. Stefan carried him upstairs. Then he sat staring into the fire for a long time, long after David and Helena were home and asleep. There was a bottle of Powers on the table beside him. When he finally went upstairs to bed himself the bottle was half empty. And it was already Christmas morning. Christmas was still not easy, it shone a light on the empty place at the table. And what had happened with Hannah didn’t make it easier.

The presbytery that housed the curate and the parish priest stood where the ground started to rise up behind Baltinglass towards Baltinglass Hill. It was built slightly higher than the church it served and looked down on Weaver’s Square and the eastern end of the town. It was a squat, inelegant building, put together in a way that seemed to say nobody had cared very much what it looked like. There were lace curtains at all the windows, though it was not overlooked. Stefan stood in the bare front room. There was a dining table and a desk. A print of the Sacred Heart sat above a fireplace where there was no fire burning. It was a long time since one had been lit from the look of the dust on the kindling and newspaper ties in the grate. There were half a dozen cards on the mantelpiece but there were no other Christmas decorations. A grandfather clock ticked loudly. It felt like it was the only sound in the house. On the table were newspapers, The Irish Independent, The Wicklow People, The Carlow Nationalist, The Irish Catholic ; all dated before Christmas and all unread. Fanned out in a careful display, next to the papers, were several Catholic Truth Society booklets; ‘Stand and Deliver: a Call to Social Action’, ‘The Soviet War against God’, ‘Tolerance: Too Much of a Good Thing?’ Stefan recalled a display of the same pamphlets at Monsignor Fitzpatrick’s house in Earlsfort Terrace. The door opened. Father Carey entered, brusque and businesslike as always. He shut the door. There had been a summons, delivered via Mary Lawlor when she brought Tom home from Mass on Christmas Day. It was Stephen’s Day now and Stefan was here as requested. He had assumed it would be about Tom starting school in January. That was all agreed though; what did the bloody man want now?

‘It didn’t seem right to speak to you yesterday, Sergeant, on Christmas Day. But something has come to my attention, so utterly fantastical that my first instinct was to dismiss the thing entirely. Yet it appears to be true.’

‘I’m not with you at all, Father.’

‘I’m right in thinking Tom was in Dublin with you before Christmas?’

‘Yes. He came up for a day with his grandparents.’

‘And were they party to this? I would hope not.’ The look of sanctimonious shock would have made Stefan laugh under different circumstances, but the aura of satisfaction that hung about the priest told him that there was nothing funny going on. He still made no connection though.

‘Party to what?’

‘You took a Catholic boy into a Jewish place of worship?’

For a moment he was puzzled that Father Carey had this information at all. What was Tom’s Christmas outing and the bit of police work that had intruded into it to do with him? Stefan’s job and the farm at Kilranelagh rarely touched. It was nothing he worked at; it wasn’t a separation he sought. It was just how it was. But the two worlds had touched, for a few moments, that afternoon in Dublin. He’d barely thought about it since, even if he had thought about Hannah Rosen. It was only as the curate brought the worlds into collision that the implications of those minutes in Adelaide Road hit home. Tom would have talked about it, of course he would. Why wouldn’t he? It was something new, something exotic, something he had enjoyed. The rabbi had made him laugh. Stefan finally understood why there was satisfaction behind the look of holy pain on Father Carey’s angular face.

He saw a winter’s day, fourteen years ago. He was fifteen. A crowd of men and women and children, forty or fifty, stood in front of the ruined abbey in Baltinglass, as his grandfather’s coffin was carried into the little Church of Ireland church beside it. Snow had fallen the night before. Thin ice was breaking up on the Slaney below the abbey. Among the crowd were some of his grandfather’s closest friends. Three men came forward to walk into the church behind the other mourners. The rest would bow their heads in the cemetery beside the church, as the coffin was lowered into the ground; some would wipe away tears; but they would not walk through the door of the church that their own Church said was not a real church at all.

‘He lit a candle there, that’s what I’m told!’

‘There were children lighting candles. He lights a candle whenever he goes into the church, to say a prayer for his mother. He wouldn’t know — ’

‘Are you telling me he was praying there now?’

‘The priest was telling them a story from the Bible. He was listening.’

‘You told him the man was a priest, did you?’

‘All right, the rabbi. I didn’t tell him anything. We’re talking about minutes, a few minutes. I didn’t think. I’m sorry.’ It was hard not to wonder whether he would have thought if it hadn’t been Hannah he had been meeting. There had been no real reason to be there with Tom. It could have waited.