Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

In Lincoln Place there was a terrace of empty buildings. There were boarded-up shop fronts below and rows of black, broken windows above. The previous year one of the buildings had collapsed. There were piles of rubble where demolition had started and abruptly stopped, and on either side of the gap scaffolding held up the walls of adjacent buildings. A corrugated iron fence had shut off the collapsed building at first but the steel sheets had been robbed and the rubble and broken walls were open to the street. The man had followed Stefan Gillespie back to Annie O’Neill’s earlier. He had followed him again that evening and waited, first outside Neary’s and then in Grafton Street, never staying still for long, never being in one place too many times, always at a good distance. And when Stefan was clearly heading back to Westland Row he didn’t follow him at all. He made his own way straight to Lincoln Place and waited. All that mattered was that there was no one there to see him. And it was late enough now. It was quiet. It would be all right.

He came at Stefan from behind, out of the darkness of the rubble of the ruined building. One arm was round Stefan’s head, pulling his neck back, stopping his breath. The other was round his chest, pinning his arms to his sides. He was being dragged into the darkness, over the piles of bricks and broken glass and roof tiles and rubbish. It was so sudden and so unexpected that it took only seconds before he was behind half walls and heaped debris, unable to breathe, unable to make any sound except the choking in his throat. He was trying to kick, but the man was very strong. And as he was pulled back, further and further from the street, the man’s elbow closed tighter on his neck. His lungs were bursting. Then the grip loosened. The man spun him round and pushed him against a wall. He held him with one hand and punched him in the stomach with the other, again and again.

Stefan dropped to the ground. He tried to move but he couldn’t. He looked up. The man was standing over him. He couldn’t see properly. It wasn’t just the darkness. He had been almost unconscious. Now he began to make out the shape looming above him. Then it was clearer, even in the dim light. It was Detective Garda Sean Og Moran, Jimmy Lynch’s errand boy. He was holding a pistol in his hand. Stefan struggled to get up. Moran kicked him back. Then he knelt down. One knee was on Stefan’s chest. One hand pinned his neck again. The other hand held the gun. Stefan knew what it was: the captive bolt pistol. He was going to disappear too. Maybe he’d lie in a shallow grave in the mountains, just like Vincent Walsh and Susan Field. Tom would never even know what had happened to him. It was the image of Tom that filled his head. He tensed his hands. They were the only part of his body that had any strength left. And they were free. His fingers were touching something hard and cold close by. It was a piece of lead pipe.

As the big man cocked the pistol and bent closer Stefan swung his arm up, finding every bit of strength he had left. The lead hit Moran on the side of the head. He cried out and fell sideways. There was silence for a moment. Stefan knew that moment might be all he had. His blood was flowing; he was breathing deeply. He pulled himself up, leaning against the wall. Sean Og was pushing himself up too, still dazed. He was still holding the gun, but it was no use to him at a distance. Stefan stepped forward, steadier now. He swung the pipe again, holding it with both hands now, driving it into the detective’s ribs. Moran fell again. The gun dropped. He was in pain, agonising pain. But he was still trying to lift himself. Stefan swung the pipe against the back of his head. Sean Og collapsed for the third time. And he didn’t try to get up. For a few seconds Stefan stood over him with the pipe. He wanted to keep hitting him. He wanted to kill him. There was a little light now. The cloud was clearing. As he looked down he saw the pistol glinting in a puddle of oily water. He picked it up. Then he climbed over the piles of bricks and rubble and walked back into Lincoln Place.

Stefan winced with pain as the Mother Superior of the Convent of the Good Shepherd dabbed iodine on to his chest and back. It was the next morning and he sat shirtless in Mother Eustacia’s office. He hadn’t asked for her help, but the blood still seeping from the wounds inflicted on him by Detective Garda Moran was spotting his shirt. She looked at the bruising on his throat and neck. She drew her own conclusions, but said nothing. It would be an exaggeration to say she was pleased to see Stefan; she remembered his last visit and she remembered the dark-haired woman he’d come to collect.

‘You shouldn’t have left this.’

‘It looks worse than it is.’

‘I’d say it’s worse than it looks.’

She walked to a cupboard and put the bottle away. As he dressed himself she sat behind her desk and put her clasped hands on the table. The good-shepherding was over. She looked at him with an air of cautious disapproval. ‘I need to ask you some questions, Reverend Mother.’

‘So I understand.’

‘It’s about a woman who was brought here.’

‘A lot of women come here.’

‘It was last year. The twenty-sixth of July. She was brought here quite late that night, in a car, by two men. One of them was a guard.’ She was not going to be communicative, that was obvious enough; to say the other one was a priest wouldn’t help. She might know about that or she might not know, but it was Garda Sean Og Moran he needed to find out about now.

‘I think you know that’s not unusual.’

‘He wouldn’t have been in uniform.’

She said nothing.

‘It was an abortion. Something went wrong. They couldn’t stop her bleeding. She should have gone to a proper hospital, but the men came here with her.’

‘These things happen. It wouldn’t be the first time.’

‘I think you saw her.’

‘If I did I would have told them to take her straight to the Coombe.’

‘That’s what you did.’

‘Then there don’t seem to be any more questions, Sergeant.’

‘She died.’

‘Unfortunately that also happens.’

‘Do you remember her? Her name was Susan Field.’

‘Why do you want to know about this?’

‘She didn’t die because she couldn’t get to a hospital in time. She died because the guard didn’t bother to take her there. Either he let her die or he killed her.’

She was silent again. He knew she remembered that night.

‘We found her body buried in the Dublin Mountains.’

‘Unpleasant as that is, it doesn’t mean she was killed.’

‘I know she was killed. That’s my job.’

‘And my job is to provide a place of refuge.’

Stefan’s opinion of that place of refuge was written on his face.

‘People want their sewers to run under the streets, Sergeant, out of sight and out of smell. Isn’t that part of your job too? You’re a policeman. When I pray for the women in my charge it’s not because the people who send them here don’t need praying for too. But I leave that to others.’ The contempt in her voice was not for the women who were locked away behind the convent walls.

He looked at her hard. In those last words there was almost contact, not sympathy, but something.

‘You don’t seem very surprised by any of this.’

‘It’s a long time since what men do to women has surprised me.’

‘Did you know the men who brought her here?’

She hesitated, but she had made her decision.

‘I saw the guard. He carried her in. The other man stayed outside in the car.’

It made sense. Moran was a big man. It wouldn’t have been difficult. She was giving him what she knew now. If she didn’t know the man in the car was a priest it wasn’t going to help to tell her, let alone tell her about the other priest, the one in Earlsfort Terrace, who had arranged it all and wanted it covered up.