Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

‘Vielen Dank.’

‘I didn’t expect to find Keller here, Father,’ Stefan replied in English.

The priest stiffened, his hands stayed cupped to his face.

‘This is one of the longest piers in Europe, seven hundred yards. Sea air, sea views, and the end of the pier is highly recommended for its lack of dust. The brochure says the only thing there isn’t is monotony. Let’s see.’

The priest still didn’t move.

‘Will we take a constitutional, Father? I think so.’

Francis Byrne did as he was told. They started to walk slowly along the pier.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Detective Sergeant Gillespie. I’m a Garda officer.’ Byrne didn’t respond. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you since last year, about Susan Field’s death. You’ll remember you wrote a letter to my inspector, to say you didn’t know Susan very well, and how sorry you were to hear she’d died. I had a lot more questions at the time, but they were never asked. You did say you’d never heard of Hugo Keller. You know him now though.’

‘Are you with Hannah?’ The hand holding the cigarette was shaking.

It was Stefan’s turn not to respond. He didn’t need to.

‘I told her what I could,’ said the priest quietly, looking out to sea.

Even in those uncertain, fearful words Stefan knew that whatever Francis Byrne had told Hannah Rosen, it was not the truth, certainly not all of it, but none of that mattered.

‘Do you know where Hannah is, Father?’

The priest was too preoccupied with himself to hear the question.

‘I wanted to tell her everything. I tried to. I can’t lie any more!’

He stopped and turned to face Stefan. There was a plea for help in his eyes, and they were growing wet with tears. Getting someone to confess was usually the hard part for Stefan, yet it looked like getting Byrne to stop was going to be the problem now. It was what had happened yesterday and the day before that Stefan needed to know about, not the past; but Hannah had broken the lock on the cupboard where Francis Byrne kept his secrets and Stefan’s arrival had just kicked the door open. However hard he tried to bring the priest back to Hannah and Danzig, it was the past that was pouring out now.

It was fast and confused. He told Stefan he hadn’t gone to Merrion Square with Susan that day. It was only when something went wrong that Keller had phoned him and told him he had to come. It was serious. She was bleeding badly; she was barely conscious. She was asking for him. Someone had to take her to hospital. There was a car. The driver said he was a guard. They only had to drive across the square to Holles Street but the guard drove to the Convent of the Good Shepherd instead. The Mother Superior took one look at Susan and said she couldn’t help. They needed to get her to a proper hospital. The Coombe was nearest, but on the way the guard stopped the car. Susan wasn’t moving. It was too late. She was dead. The guard told him to go home. No one could help her. The only thing he could do was pray for her. And he had done what the guard said. He left her there. As Father Byrne closed his eyes, his lips moved silently. He was praying, for himself. Stefan didn’t need divine guidance to know who the unknown guard was: Jimmy Lynch.

As Father Byrne spoke, staring out at the Baltic Sea, Stefan simply listened. He knew he wouldn’t get any more out of him till this was over. The priest hadn’t looked at Stefan as he told the story; only once, at the end, did he turn and hold the detective’s gaze, shaking his head, somehow still in disbelief. Then he turned back to stare silently at the grey sea. Stefan had the feeling he was wondering if he couldn’t find an answer and an end to it all out there. He doubted Byrne had the guts for that, but he didn’t much care if he had or not. There was more self-pity in Francis Byrne than Stefan had the stomach for. He had been on Kilmashogue when the earth spewed up Susan Field’s body. That was something to feel pity for. All this was a waste of time. He grabbed the priest’s arm and pulled him back round again, hard.

‘Where did Hannah go?’ Stefan demanded.

Byrne looked at him blankly.

‘When she left you, where did she go?’

‘I … I don’t know.’

‘The police were looking for her. Why?’

‘I don’t know anything about the police. Why would I?’

There was a brief hesitation. It didn’t sit with all that gushing truth.

‘Who did you speak to?’

‘She came here, and we talked, and she went away. That’s all.’

‘What were you saying to Hugo Keller this morning?’

‘Nothing. Nothing that concerns Hannah or you.’

The defences were going up again, but Stefan already knew that when Hannah left him the priest had contacted Keller. It wouldn’t have been difficult to find where she was staying, and the first thing the police would have discovered was that the name Hugo Keller had given them wasn’t the one on the Danziger Hof register, or on her passport. She was supposed to be Mrs Anna Harvey, not Hannah Rosen.

‘You’re still lying, Father. You told him she was in Danzig.’

‘All right. I panicked. I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said not to worry. It didn’t matter. He said he’d sort it out.’

‘With a little bit of help from the Gestapo.’

‘No, of course not. He said she wasn’t important.’

‘But you’re important, aren’t you? Important to Keller. I don’t know why exactly, but I do know what his speciality is. He’s blackmailing you.’

Byrne didn’t answer, but the answer was in his eyes.

‘It wouldn’t be so hard would it, not with your track record? An affair, an abortion, a dead woman. It’s not going to get you a job in the Curia.’

There was grim silence now. Perhaps the hold Hugo Keller had over the priest was stronger than the fear inside, stronger than guilt, stronger than what, once, he felt for Susan Field. But Stefan had to push. He had to know what he was dealing with.

‘Would you know what a captive bolt pistol is, Father?’

It felt like the words barely registered; they meant nothing.

‘They use it to stun animals, before they slaughter them.’

The priest looked puzzled. Stefan watched his face.

‘Susan Field took a bolt in the head from one before she was buried.’

If anything Byrne had said was real, so was his disbelief.

‘But she was dead! The guard said she was dead!’

‘I’d say the guard who drove the car from Merrion Square that night was a man called Jimmy Lynch, Father. He’s a guard all right, a detective sergeant. He was taking backhanders from your friend Keller. But I don’t think he’d have killed Susan Field without Hugo’s say so. That’s the man you handed Hannah Rosen to, to sort things out. Now no one’s seen her since.’

A day earlier, around the time Stefan Gillespie was boarding the midday Deutsche Luft Hansa flight from Croydon to Berlin, Hannah Rosen was standing in the library of a big apartment in the Danzig suburb of Langfuhr. Through the window most of the view was taken up by a large building of red brick and stone with a highly decorated, crenellated frontage that echoed the Hanseatic houses of the old town. It was the city’s university, the Technische Hochschule. Behind it were the wooded hills she had seen from the tram on her way to Oliva. Half an hour earlier the men who had pulled her into a car in front of the Danziger Hof had unlocked the door of the small bedroom that had been her cell. They led her through the apartment to a library. It was empty. They left her there with a cup of coffee and a roll.

That morning she had heard the sound of shouting and cheering outside, even in the locked room. Now she watched through the library window. The ever-present swastikas hung along the front of the university building; hundreds of students stood in front of it with flags and banners. Somewhere a man was speaking, but she could make out none of the words, only the ebb and flow of roaring and chanting from the crowd. She felt their wild enthusiasm. They were laughing and applauding. Without the flags, and with the words unheard, they seemed almost like people she knew. They looked like people she knew. She turned round, startled, as the door opened.