Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

‘The guard you sent didn’t take Susan Field to hospital,’ continued Stefan, ignoring the denials he had just heard. ‘He took her to the Convent of the Good Shepherd. They couldn’t do anything. She’d already lost too much blood. I’m not sure what happened next. Either she died or the guard killed her. And if he didn’t actually kill her, he went to some lengths to make sure she was dead. I don’t know what his instructions were, but I know you sent him.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about. This means nothing to me, nothing.’

He spoke quietly. It wasn’t so much about confidence now. Stefan’s words troubled him in some way, but it wasn’t the right way. He still felt he was untouchable, but there was something else. He looked puzzled. The indignation was gone and it was hard to read what was in his face now.

‘I don’t think my superior officers are going to be satisfied with what Father Byrne told us in his letter,’ said Stefan, ‘however much they want to be. You wrote most of it for him anyway. But that’s only the beginning. There was another body next to Miss Field’s. You’ll remember him.’

Monsignor Fitzpatrick looked confused. ‘What other body?’

‘The one you longed to feel throbbing next to yours — Vincent Walsh’s. That’s what it said in your letter, didn’t it? I’ve seen them, the letters. Obviously Vincent’s body won’t have been throbbing next to anyone else’s for a long time now. Not since someone shot him in the head with a captive bolt pistol, which is, oddly, what happened to Susan Field as well.’

The priest stared blankly.

‘Vincent.’

It was all he said but he made no pretence that he didn’t know who Stefan was talking about. He moved towards the desk, very slowly. He stood for a moment, leaning on it. He repeated the name quietly. ‘Vincent.’ It was barely a whisper. He seemed unaware that Stefan was still there. He sank into the chair. Stefan hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t this. And it wasn’t right. He couldn’t believe that the man in front of him knew anything at all about Vincent Walsh’s death. But there was still Detective Sergeant Lynch; Lynch and the love letters, Lynch and Keller, Lynch and the car that came for Susan Field.

‘Tell me about Jimmy Lynch, Monsignor.’

‘What?’ Robert Fitzpatrick looked up again.

‘Detective Sergeant Lynch.’

‘I don’t know any Detective Sergeant Lynch.’ Fitzpatrick was a beaten man. It was hard for Stefan to believe he was dragging this lie out of himself, but it couldn’t be the truth.

‘You sent him to help Father Byrne. You sent him to get Susan Field.’

‘I didn’t send anyone,’ he said. ‘When Francis called, he said he needed a car. I told him we’d see to it. So we sent a taxi, just a taxi. I don’t know anything about a guard.’

They were automatic words, like automatic writing. He was somewhere else, and the fact that he was somewhere else testified to the truth of the words. And suddenly Stefan was looking at another face. It was the face of Hugo Keller, dying in the kitchen of the house in Eschenweg. Keller talked about the guard driving the car, the guard who took Susan Field away, the guard the monsignor sent. He didn’t know who that guard was — Hugo Keller, the man who knew everything about everybody. But Jimmy Lynch had been selling him information for years. He was bought and paid for. Stefan had been so fixed on the one connection he had that linked Vincent Walsh and Susan Field that Hugo Keller’s nameless guard had automatically become Detective Sergeant Lynch. But now, suddenly, it wasn’t him at all.

As Stefan came out into the hall of Fitzpatrick’s house again, Sister Brigid was climbing the stairs from the kitchen, carrying a tray with a cup of tea and a plate of scones and jam. She pursed her lips disapprovingly at him.

‘I’m sure you’ve upset him again.’

‘Yes.’ He didn’t feel like apologising, but he did. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Did Francis look peaceful when you saw him, Mr Gillespie?’

There wasn’t any point telling her he looked the way people do when they’ve been beaten to death, and that peacefulness isn’t really in it.

‘He looked peaceful enough, Sister.’

‘I think in a way he has come back to us.’ She smiled sadly and walked to the door into the study. She knocked. There was no answer. As Stefan stepped out into Earlsfort Terrace, Brigid opened the door. Monsignor Robert Fitzpatrick was sobbing, his head buried in his hands on the desk. She put down the tea and the scones and folded her brother in her arms.

The man who followed Stefan Gillespie from Earlsfort Terrace across into Stephen’s Green would not make the mistake of being seen. He wasn’t good at everything he did, but he was good at that. He could keep his distance; he had the instincts that told him when to disappear; he could always see his man again in a crowd. It didn’t much matter if he lost him anyway, he wouldn’t be difficult to find. If not today tomorrow, but today would be best, before he made more trouble. It was still early. It wouldn’t be dark till after nine, but when night came he’d know where Sergeant Gillespie was. That would be the time to do it.

Twenty-four hours earlier Stefan had known who killed Vincent Walsh and Susan Field. If Detective Sergeant Jimmy Lynch could be bought by Hugo Keller to collect information, he could be bought by Robert Fitzpatrick to clean up after him. A priest with such a high profile, who was in the habit of having sex with men like Vincent Walsh and writing them letters describing it, was always going to need help with his dirty laundry. The image of the moral crusader didn’t sit very well with arranging abortions for priestly proteges who got themselves into trouble either. That’s how Stefan had put it all together. The only question had been how far Lynch was following Fitzpatrick’s instructions and how far he’d been, in the way of the Nazis the monsignor saw as the Church’s salvation, working towards his Fuhrer. Now, as he sat over a bony kipper and stewed tea in Bewley’s Cafe he could see how much of it didn’t fit after all, and how much he had ignored to get an answer.

Hugo Keller had told him and he hadn’t heard. It was a guard, not Detective Sergeant Lynch, a guard. There were the Blueshirts too, the ones who had come for Vincent that night after the Eucharistic Mass, the night he was murdered. They couldn’t have had anything to do with Jimmy Lynch. He was exactly the kind of anti-Treaty IRA man the Blueshirts had been created to fight. Besides, Billy Donnelly had sat on those letters for a year before Lynch even joined the Guards. And however Lynch found out about them he didn’t take them to help Robert Fitzpatrick, he took them to sell to Hugo Keller. There were always too many holes. The fact that Jimmy Lynch was bent didn’t make him a killer, though he’d killed easily enough in the IRA. The fact that Robert Fitzpatrick hated Jews and admired Adolf Hitler didn’t make him a killer either. Perhaps Stefan had wanted it to be the monsignor. He wanted it because of everything Fitzpatrick believed. He wanted it because the curate in Baltinglass was a little Fitzpatrick too. And there was Hannah. Perhaps he wanted to give her the answers she needed just a little too much. He had missed something. Now he had to go back and find what he’d missed. If anyone would let him. But if he couldn’t, the book was still in his pocket, Hugo Keller’s insurance policy, and tucked into it at the back were the letters to Vincent Walsh. It was his insurance policy now. If there were no more answers to find, Stefan had his weapon, and he would use it.

He was tired of thinking as he followed the familiar wall of Trinity College along Nassau Street, but the back bedroom on the top floor of Annie O’Neill’s Private Hotel in Westland Row wasn’t anything to hurry back to. The trains would have stopped now, but by five in the morning they’d be rattling over the bridge again and shaking the windows. It was cheap and Annie knew the Gardai. Her husband had been in the Dublin Metropolitan Police when he disappeared in 1921. She always said he’d been shot by Michael Collins personally, which was no small honour, but everyone knew he’d left her for a woman who had a butcher’s in Clonmel. There were always bottles in the sideboard in the dining room at Annie’s and if you wanted to sit up all night with one of them you paid her what you thought you’d drunk, and if you couldn’t remember she wouldn’t overcharge you. The sheets weren’t as clean as you’d like but at least they got washed now and again, and because she was used to guards staying when they were up from the country, she didn’t care what time of the day or night you came and went. If you wanted rashers at five o’clock in the morning you’d find her in the kitchen cooking them. She said she could never sleep once the trains started up. When she was younger you could get more than rashers if you had a problem sleeping. Stefan smiled. At least Annie made him laugh. And one drink before he went to bed wasn’t such a bad idea after all that tea.