Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

‘You knew him then?’

‘Poofs aren’t my speciality.’

‘No?’

Stefan looked at the Special Branch man for a long moment. There was no point arguing with Inspector Donaldson now. There was no point even starting on the way the inspector had pushed aside the need to question Francis Byrne. And there was no point letting Detective Sergeant Lynch know what Billy Donnelly had told him about Vincent Walsh’s letters. If Lynch thought it was all done and dusted, it was better to let him think it. Stefan needed to know what it meant; then he might have something to use.

‘The discovery of these two bodies so close to each other seems to be a coincidence. There’s nothing to connect them.’ Inspector Donaldson put his hands together on his desk; he had dealt with it. However much he disliked Special Branch, Lynch would take it away. That would be that.

But Stefan wasn’t done.

‘Except that they were both shot in the head by a captive bolt pistol.’

James Donaldson nodded complacently; he wasn’t unprepared.

‘It’s an imaginative theory on Doctor Wayland-Smith’s part. I know he likes to play the detective, but I understand that what’s actually there is simply damage to the skulls, along with all sorts of damage to other bones, all exacerbated by the landslip. I think he’s rather cooled off on the idea.’

As Stefan walked back to his office, Jimmy Lynch caught up with him.

‘I’ve never liked you much, Stevie, but you’ve surprised me.’

‘What’s the matter now?’

‘I tell you, I’ve a list of priests I’d like to knock the crap out of, that’s as long as your arm. I never quite had the balls. Could you do a few for me?’

‘Good news travels fast.’

‘Donald Duck doesn’t know yet?’

‘No, but I’m sure he will.’

‘Me too, Stevie, me too.’

Lynch carried on downstairs, whistling cheerfully. Stefan watched the swagger as he went. If he was really looking at a murderer he was looking at one who was being paid by An Garda Siochana to cover up his own crimes.

Stefan walked slowly back into the detectives’ office to find Dessie MacMahon looking more forlorn than when he’d left him half an hour ago.

‘You’re wanted at Garda HQ. It’s the Commissioner.’

They turned to see a slightly wild-eyed Inspector Donaldson standing in the doorway. Only minutes ago, Stefan had left him congratulating himself on getting rid of an uncomfortable case and bringing his detectives under control. The call from the Garda Commissioner had come only seconds later. The news about Stefan’s Christmas had reached him at last.

‘You ignorant, fucking, Protestant bollocks, Gillespie!’

Through the windows of the Garda Commissioner’s office Stefan could see the bare winter trees of the Phoenix Park. Across the desk in front of him sat the Commissioner, Ned Broy, turning the pages of a slim file of letters. His round face was deceptively benign; the severely cropped hair and the small, piercing eyes told more. They didn’t really know each other. Broy had been head of the Detective Branch when Stefan joined in 1932. Not long afterwards he had moved into the top job when the new president, Eamon de Valera, had sacked General Eoin O’Duffy, the hostile commissioner he had inherited from the previous government. In response O’Duffy put his Blueshirts on the streets and threatened to march on Dublin. No one was quite sure what the Gardai would do if it came to a coup. Ned Broy’s answer was to draft scores of ex-IRA men into Special Branch. They were immediately dubbed the Broy Harriers after a pack of Wicklow foxhounds. Their job was to take on the Blueshirts if they had to, but no one had any doubt they would take on their new comrades in the Garda Siochana if it came to the crunch. It didn’t. That was history now, but in Ireland history never quite goes away. Stefan was reflecting on the conversation at Pearse Street. Jimmy Lynch was one of the Broy Harriers. He was Ned Broy’s man.

There was a knock on the door. An elderly priest came in. Father Michael McCauley was the Garda chaplain. Broy gestured to him to sit.

‘You’ll know Father McCauley, Sergeant?’

‘Not really, sir.’

‘I’m here to pray for you, Sergeant.’ The priest gave a wry smile.

‘You know you broke this curate’s nose?’ said the Commissioner.

‘I didn’t know, sir.’

‘I have that from his bishop. I have quite a lot from his bishop.’

‘I’ve got no excuse, sir.’

‘I wouldn’t say that. I got your father into the station at Baltinglass this morning. I spoke to him on the telephone. I knew him in the DMP.’

Stefan looked at Broy with considerable surprise. He was unaware of any past connection between his father and the Commissioner, but when his father left the Dublin Metropolitan Police, before the War of Independence, Ned Broy had been both a detective and an IRA spy. David Gillespie had always said he resigned because he wouldn’t take sides. But it was true that he had never elaborated on his choice; maybe it hadn’t been a choice at all. It had never occurred to Stefan that it might have been because of what he knew.

‘It was a long time ago, but I have reason to remember him.’ The past hung over them for a moment. It was all the Commissioner was going to say. ‘The point is I know what it was about.’

‘Does that help, sir?’

‘No. It still means it was the stupidest thing you could have done.’

‘He was goading me. I think he almost wanted me to do it.’

‘That wouldn’t surprise me. And you gave him what he wanted.’

Stefan nodded; he knew that all too well himself.

Broy turned to the chaplain. ‘Do you know this Father Carey?’

‘I’ve never met him, but I’ve asked around now. He has a history of this kind of thing. In his last parish there were complaints about him refusing to sanction mixed marriages, even when dispensation had been given, and there was some insulting behaviour towards the Church of Ireland minister. There was also a child taken away from her father in similar circumstances to Sergeant Gillespie’s. In the end the man converted to keep his daughter. It caused such bad feeling that Carey was moved on. But even though I’ve never met the man, he has written to me, about you, Sergeant Gillespie.’

‘What for?’ Stefan was puzzled.

‘He wanted my opinion on your suitability as a father, in the light of your wife’s death, and bearing in mind that you weren’t a Catholic. I told him it wasn’t my business to have any opinion on your abilities as a father, but that the Garda Siochana had a very high opinion of you as a policeman. He wrote again asking me to put what he called “professional pressure” on you to convert to Catholicism. I have to say I didn’t bother to reply to that.’

‘You’ve made a pig’s ear of it, Sergeant,’ interrupted Broy.

Stefan didn’t need telling.

‘Look, sir, when I was married I agreed our children would be brought up as Catholics. I took it seriously and I’ve stuck to it — so have my parents. There’s hardly a Sunday Tom misses Mass. And it’s not even what my wife would have wanted. I persuaded her we should marry in a Catholic church. I knew what it would do to her family if we didn’t. Now, whatever I do it’s never enough. It’s not like I’m ramming anything down Tom’s throat, I don’t even believe — ’ He stopped, feeling he was making things worse.

‘There you go again, Sergeant. If you’re going to be an atheist you need to be a Catholic atheist, not a Protestant one!’ The chaplain smiled.

‘There’s a pile of shite here any self-respecting bishop would have thrown back at the man.’ Ned Broy gestured at the file on his desk. ‘You can feel the spit coming off the page. Jesus, you’d think you were running the Hellfire Club down in Baltinglass. He’s got lists of books in your father’s sitting room we should all be out there burning. There’s even the year you spent at Trinity to show what an evil-thinking bollocks you are. God only knows what kind of low-life Protestant bastards you were associating with! It goes on. I don’t know how many nights you’ve had a few too many in Sheridan’s in Baltinglass with Sergeant Kavanagh. It can’t be that many. You don’t live there! But you’re a drunk as well. I know Kavanagh as it happens. Now he is a drunk! This gobshite’s got it in for you and he’s got his bishop behind him now. But what was this jaunt to the fecking synagogue?’