The City of Strangers

‘Have we got no plates now?’

‘Sorry, I haven’t got time.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’ve to be in Dublin. I’ll only just get the train.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. They want to see me at Garda HQ. They didn’t tell Gerry Riordan what it was about. I could see the expression on his face coming down the phone line at me!’ He laughed again, grabbing an apple from the bowl on the sideboard. He looked down at the lamb, sleeping in a cardboard box by the stove. ‘And don’t forget her, will you Tom?’

‘I won’t,’ his son nodded, still reading, not looking up.

He ran upstairs a lot faster than he’d come down. He wasn’t tired now. In a place where not much happened, anything happening was an event.

In the farmyard David Gillespie was driving a cow and a calf into the loose box next to the barn. Stefan took the bicycle that was leaning against the wall by the front door and cycled out round his father and the cow and calf; the cow stopped, bellowing darkly, and nudging her wobbling calf away.

‘I don’t know what time I’ll be back, Pa. I’ve to go to Dublin.’

His father nodded and tapped the cow’s backside.

‘Your Ma said.’

‘Ned Broy wants to see me. And pronto, apparently!’

‘What have you done?’ said David with a wry smile.

‘He’ll be worried about the sheep stealing again, I’d say, Pa.’ He rode out of the farmyard, down to the road.

His father watched him for a while, remembering the years that had passed since his son was last called to Garda Headquarters. At the end of all that Stefan had left his job as a detective in Dublin, and had come back to Baltinglass to work as a uniformed sergeant in the small West Wicklow town. It had been his own choice, driven as much as anything else by the responsibility he felt to his own son. Tom was only five then, living with his grandparents on the farm, seeing his father once a week, sometimes less. The four years that had passed since then had been happy ones for the most part, but in a family where emotions were sometimes as deeply hidden as they were deeply felt, David Gillespie knew that what his son gave to that happiness came at a price.

It wasn’t a price Stefan begrudged, but it was still a price. His life had been on hold. There were things that weren’t easy; there were corners where the comfortable contentment the Garda sergeant showed his Wicklow neighbours was less than comfortable. He lived in a place he loved, with the people he loved. It was what he had felt he had to do; it was not all he was.

For Stefan’s mother it was simple enough; all that was missing was a woman, not to take the place of her son’s now six-years-dead wife, Maeve, but to fill the empty places.

David Gillespie knew it went further than that. A long time ago he had put his own life on hold, for very different reasons, and he had come back to the farm above Baltinglass to give himself the space to breathe. He had breathed the air that came down from the mountains very deeply, and like his son he loved it, but it was a narrower life than he had wanted, with all its gifts. David had found a way to calm what was restless and dissatisfied in himself; perhaps he had nowhere else to go. But he recognised the same restlessness in his son; he recognised that it went deeper too.

He looked round the farmyard for a moment, then up at the hills that surrounded it, Keadeen, Kilranelagh, Baltinglass Hill. It was a great deal, but it would not be enough, not the way it had been for him, even if Stefan had persuaded himself it could be. David Gillespie shrugged, and turned back to the suspicious cow and her calf, driving them into the loose box.

Inevitably some of the same thoughts came into Stefan’s head as he cycled through Baltinglass’s Main Street and along Mill Street to the station, but it was easier to think about the present than the past. As he sat on the train following the River Slaney north towards Naas and Dublin, he looked out of the window and thought how little what he’d been doing in recent weeks could interest the brass in the Phoenix Park. He smiled. Sheep stealing really was about as serious as it got.

There was the new Dance Hall Act, of course, which required all dances to be licensed in light of the moral dangers the Church felt were inherent in dancing. A spate of unpopular raids was taking Stefan into the courthouse in Baltinglass on a weekly basis now. Yesterday he’d been giving evidence against the Secretary of the Dunlavin Bicycling Association and the Rathvilly Association Football Club. Admittedly the Dance Hall Act was causing considerable anger among the unmarried guards in Baltinglass who, when they weren’t raiding the dances, were dancing at them.

Then there was the pen of in-lamb ewes he was pursuing, that had disappeared from Paddy Kelly’s farm on Spynans Hill in February. Christy Hannity had bought them from Paddy at a farm sale and swore blind the old man had put them back on to the mountain while he was in the pub. It wasn’t the first time Paddy Kelly had played this trick and got away with it. All he had to say now was that mountain sheep had their own ways and Christy was too drunk to remember what he’d done with them.

And there were two days wasted on James MacDonald who had assaulted the Water Bailiff, Cathal Patterson, after refusing to give up a salmon found in his possession by the Slaney. He claimed the salmon was a trout, which he had since eaten. As for the Water Bailiff’s nose, didn’t he break it himself, tripping over a dead cat as he was walking out of Sheridan’s Bar?

It was hard to push the past out of the way altogether as Stefan walked from Kingsbridge Station through the Phoenix Park to the long, low stone building that was part eighteenth-century army barracks and part Irish country house. Nothing very much had happened in the last four years; most of what had, had happened to his son. He had no problem with that; it was why he had left CID, why he had left Dublin, why he went home. But the thought of how easily and how completely he had left behind the job he had always wanted, since the day he joined the Gardaí, had never struck him as starkly before as it did in the few moments he spent waiting outside Ned Broy’s office.

It hadn’t only been about Tom of course. He had also left because it suited everybody, the Garda Commissioner included. He had been involved in investigating two murders that in the end nobody wanted investigated too publicly. There had been justice of a kind, finally, but it had been a rough justice that the Irish state didn’t want to know about.

For a time it had been easiest for Detective Sergeant Gillespie to become plain Sergeant Gillespie in a country police station. No one had really meant him to stay there so long. He hadn’t intended that himself. It just happened, because that was what was best for Tom. Now, as Stefan sat in Ned Broy’s office again, he could feel an awkwardness in the Garda Commissioner. Sergeant Gillespie’s submerging in a backwater had not been what he had intended either.

Whatever was urgent, the Commissioner’s opening words weren’t.

‘So, how’s West Wicklow?’

‘Quiet enough, sir.’

‘You’re keeping Gerry Riordan in check, I hope.’

‘Well, mostly he does what he’s told.’

The Commissioner smiled. There was a moment’s silence.

‘You’ve been there a long time.’

‘Four years doesn’t seem so long. Time goes fast enough.’

‘Bollocks, you’re not old enough to say that yet.’

Stefan laughed. They were only words, but the Commissioner was looking at him quizzically now, remembering what had happened before.

‘Your father’s well? And your lad?’

The Commissioner had a good memory at least.

‘We’re all grand.’

‘And you’re happy down the country?’

‘Happy enough, sir.’ Stefan was aware that the polite remarks, whatever was about to follow, meant nothing to Broy, but it was the first time anyone had asked him such a direct question about his job, and by extension his life. The answer he gave was the answer any Irishman would give to such a question; an answer that could mean anything from despair to exultation, and everything in between. He was aware that he was avoiding a direct answer, not for the Garda Commissioner’s sake, but for his own.

‘A woman is missing.’

Broy suddenly stood up and moved slowly towards the window that looked out on to the Phoenix Park. The trees were still bare. Spring wasn’t far away now, but it still felt like winter.

‘There is every reason to believe she’s dead, and that she was killed.’ He turned back from the window. ‘The fact that she’s missing is the only thing that’s been in the newspapers so far. We can keep it like that for a little longer. And it’s helpful that we do, for various reasons. She is a Mrs Leticia Harris, with a house in Herbert Place.’

‘I think I did read something about it, sir.’

‘The evidence from the house, along with Mrs Harris’s car,’ continued the Commissioner, ‘indicates that she was the object of a very brutal attack in her home. Her car, however, was found in the grounds of a house close to Shankill, by the sea in Corbawn Lane. It’s clear she had been in the car, or her body had. At the moment we believe she was killed at the house in Herbert Place, or at least that she was dead by the time she reached Corbawn Lane, where the body was probably taken from the car and thrown into the sea. What the tides have done with her is anybody’s guess at this point.’

It was odd, but Stefan could feel his heart racing slightly. It was an unfamiliar feeling. It was excitement. It was four years since he had worked as a detective, but the instincts that had made him good at his job were still there. He felt as if a light had just been switched on inside his head.

‘Mrs Harris has a son. Owen. He’s twenty-one years old. I don’t think we know enough about him to understand what kind of man he is, but we know his relationship with his mother was very difficult, in all sorts of ways. Some of those ways had to do with money. Mrs Harris has lived apart from her husband for a considerable time, over ten years in fact. He’s a doctor, of some note, with a practice in Pembroke Road. From what Doctor Harris has told detectives, I think you’d describe the relationship between mother and son as highly strung, which is a polite way of saying they were a bloody peculiar pair. Superintendent Gregory at Dublin Castle is in charge, but it’s a big operation, involving detectives from several stations, as well as Special Branch. The short version is that we believe Owen Harris murdered his mother and dumped her in the sea.’

‘And where is he now?’ asked Stefan. The Commissioner’s tone of voice told him that wherever he was he certainly wasn’t in Garda custody.

‘New York.’

‘That was quick work.’

‘He left from Cobh two days after his mother disappeared.’

‘So is he in custody? In New York?’

‘No, but we know where he is.’

The Commissioner sat back down again, his lips pursed. It was more to do with irritation than anything else. Stefan could already sense this case was about more than a suspected murderer. Broy opened a file on his desk.

‘Mr Harris is at the Markwell Hotel, which is somewhere near Times Square – 220 West 49th Street to be exact. It’s felt there’s no need for his arrest or extradition.’

Stefan was aware this was a slightly odd way of putting it, as if it wasn’t entirely the Commissioner’s decision.

‘He’s agreed to come back to Ireland voluntarily to be interviewed, as soon as possible, as soon as practical. That’s why you’re here, Sergeant.’

This may have been the most interesting conversation Stefan Gillespie had had in a police station since he went to Baltinglass as station sergeant, but so far its purpose was as clear as mud. He looked at Broy blankly.

‘The business of bringing this man Harris back from New York is a delicate one. It’s all going to cause a stir when it comes out here, and the powers that be would rather it didn’t do the same thing in New York. Since he’s agreed to return, as I say, simply so that we can talk to him, the decision has been made not to involve the police in New York. Mr McCauley, the consul, has seen him, and there is a feeling that his mental state is – well, I think unpredictable is the word he used.’

Stefan nodded, as if this clarified things.

‘Mr Harris is in New York with the Gate Theatre. He’s some sort of stage manager. They’re on a tour and they’re about to open on Broadway.’

The expression on Broy’s face indicated that this explained something else; it didn’t but the presence of the past, and of conversations in the Commissioner’s office four years ago, was closer.

‘This Gate tour coincides with the opening of the World’s Fair in New York. You’ll have read about that, I’d say, and the Irish Pavilion? It’s de Valera’s pride and joy.’

‘A bit,’ replied Stefan.

‘You won’t have read how much the fecking pavilion’s costing.’ Broy gave a wry smile. ‘There aren’t many state secrets more secret than that one.’

‘I see,’ said Stefan, though he still didn’t.

‘It’s all about punching above our weight, that’s the thing. That’s how our leader sees it anyway. There’s a pavilion from almost every country on the face of the earth, but we’re not there to show what great fellers we are on our Emerald Isle. We’re there to show the way, to the small countries of the world. Dev wouldn’t want you to think we’re spending all that money we don’t have just to boost the holiday trade. It’s a grander scheme altogether. Aren’t we God’s living proof that the great empires are dead and it’s the independent nations that will inherit the earth?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t put too much money on it at the moment,’ said Stefan. ‘What do they think about that in what’s left of Czechoslovakia?’ The presence of what the newspapers had been full of for weeks, Germany’s dismemberment of at least one of those small nations, was hard to ignore.

‘Well, they might not have got a country, but I think they’ve got a pavilion at the World’s Fair,’ shrugged the Commissioner. ‘The future may be a long way off so. But I’m telling you why what happens in New York is important, to Dev anyway. And while we show the world what we’ve done since we kicked out the British Empire, a bit of theatre on Broadway will add to the kudos. The Gate tour is all part of it, but the whole thing’s a performance. Nobody wants headlines about an Irish actor who stopped to murder his mother before he set off for New York. We need your man Harris out of America and back here as fast as we can manage it, before he turns into the spectre at the feast. You’re going to New York to fetch him.’

It was an unexpected proposition.

‘I assume there’s a reason it’s me, sir.’ Stefan couldn’t think of one.

‘Mr Harris is in a hotel room. The consulate’s keeping an eye on him, but the people looking after him are his friends, other actors. No police, no heavy hands. I think it’s all a lot riskier than the politicians do, but that’s the decision. Mr Mac Liammóir is the one who has persuaded Harris to come back. It’s his company after all. I don’t imagine he’d be any more enthusiastic about the wrong sort of headlines than anyone here. Everyone wants the man out of there quietly. And in Mr Mac Liammóir’s words he doesn’t want some bollocks of a Dublin detective putting the shite up him. In a police force staffed mostly by bollockses – you were the least like a bollocks he could think of.’

Sergeant Gillespie smiled. It was four years since he’d last spoken to Mac Liammóir, the actor and director who was the Gate Theatre’s founder, but he didn’t need to be told those were his words.

Four years ago the body of a young man had been found buried in the Dublin Mountains, close to the body of a woman who had recently disappeared. It had been a Gate theatre ticket that had helped identify the man, but the investigation had taken Stefan Gillespie a long way from Dublin, to Danzig and the heart of the European crisis that was now threatening to spill into war. It had brought him face to face with what mattered most in his life. It had led him to the only woman he had come close to loving since the death of his wife, Maeve, six years ago. When it finished the thread of passion that had held Stefan Gillespie and Hannah Rosen briefly together had broken. It had been inevitable.

The investigation itself had concluded in the dark corridors where unwanted investigations were given an indecent burial. Micheál Mac Liammóir was a memory from that time, but Stefan remembered him as a man who had looked for discretion and trust from him, and had found it. Clearly those same qualities still mattered.

‘So everyone’s pretending he’s not a murder suspect, sir?’

‘We’re dealing with this at a distance.’ The Commissioner ignored the question. ‘The conversations are in telegrams and even they’re at second or third hand. The decision not to involve the New York police is a political one. Extradition could drag on for months if Harris digs his heels in. We’d a feller embezzled six hundred pounds as a tax collector in Kerry. It took nearly a year to get him extradited from Boston. Even that made The New York Times. If your man takes it into his head not to cooperate and we have to drag him through the courts, well, axe-murderers make great headlines. Not the ones Dev wants. Mac Liammóir thinks Harris is harmless if he’s handled the right way. His mother might have had a few things to say about that, but at the end of it all, a policeman who’s not too much like a policeman is what we want.’

‘Should I take that as a compliment, sir?’ said Stefan, smiling.

‘Mr Mac Liammóir obviously thinks it is. I’m going along with this because we are relying on the Gate. I don’t need to tell you it isn’t going down well everywhere. Superintendent Gregory is in charge of the investigation. You know him?’

Stefan knew who Gregory was. ‘I’ve probably met him. I think he was at the Castle, in Special Branch, when I was a detective at Pearse Street.’

‘Special Branch is running it. There’s no reason to think it involves anyone other than the mother or the son, except that it’s already dragging in the government, the Department of External Affairs and my fucking Uncle Tom Cobley. And while I wouldn’t say Dev’s a friend of the family, he’d know the father. Doctor Harris carries some weight. So there’s that too. Put it all together and you see why kid gloves are the order of the day, Sergeant.’

Though Stefan nodded, he wasn’t sure that handing the thing over to Special Branch was the answer to that; kid gloves weren’t their speciality.

‘You fly to New York the day after tomorrow.’

Stefan was surprised; he had assumed he would be going by boat.

‘You’ll know the flying boat service has just started operating from Foynes. I won’t tell you what it’ll cost, but somebody seems to think the wrong headlines will cost more. It will get you to New York in less than twenty-four hours. You’ll be there two days and then straight back. A boat’s going to take more than a fortnight. Right now the kid gloves are yours, Stefan. I don’t need to tell you Terry Gregory thinks this is shite. He may be right, but I’m doing it the way I’ve been asked, softly-softly. My office will make all the arrangements. There’s a detective here to fill you in. He’ll take you to see the superintendent.’ Ned Broy laughed. ‘Don’t expect much of a reception.’

As he left the Garda Commissioner’s office Stefan was surprised to see that the detective waiting for him was not the surly, jumped-up bollocks from Special Branch he was expecting, but the large and familiar figure of Dessie MacMahon, once his partner in the detectives’ office at Pearse Street Garda station. Dessie and Stefan had kept in touch over the years, but it was still a while since the two men had seen each other.

‘How’s it going, Sarge?’ grinned Dessie.

‘You tell me, Sergeant,’ Stefan answered. ‘It is sergeant now?’

‘Well, if you sit on your arse long enough –’

‘So what’s this got to do with you?’

‘They’re stuck with me. I was the first detective into Herbert Place. The maid called Pearse Street when she went into the house and saw the state of Mrs Harris’s bedroom, the blood that is. So I’m working out of Dublin Castle for the time being. But everybody’s getting a look in on this one, I tell you. I don’t know why. Superintendent Gregory decided the son killed the old lady the day they found her car at Shankill. But you still can’t move for inspectors and superintendents and chief superintendents. We’ve got Inspector O’Sullivan and Superintendent Dunlevy from Dún Laoghaire, Chief Superintendent Reynolds from Headquarters, Superintendent Clarke from Bray, not to mention Special Branch calling the shots at the Castle.’

‘You know I’ve got to bring Harris back from New York?’

‘I’ve to take you to see Superintendent Gregory,’ nodded Dessie. ‘You know you’ll be getting more of a bollocking than a briefing from him?’

Stefan smiled. ‘Let’s get on with it so.’

‘He’s busy at the moment. He’ll be out at Corbawn Lane later.’

‘Corbawn Lane where –’

‘Where Mrs Harris’s car was. It’s where he dumped her in the sea.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘The only instructions I’ve got are that you’re a fucking messenger boy and that’s how you’re to be treated. You’re not a fucking detective. You’re not part of the fucking investigation. Nobody’s to tell you anything about anything, or give you even a sniff of the job. You’ll be bollocked when the super’s got the time. Apart from that, Mr Gregory didn’t tell me to welcome you aboard, but I’m sure if he wasn’t so busy he would have.’

They walked out of Garda Headquarters.

‘I tell you what I’d like to do?’ Stefan gave Dessie a wry smile. It was a long time since he’d been this close to a murder. ‘Have a look at Herbert Place. That’s where she was killed? So if you were the first one in there –’

‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’

‘Yes, so it’ll be more than your job’s worth. Is that right?’

Detective Sergeant MacMahon grinned.

‘With a bit of luck.’

*

‘Blood.’

As Detective Sergeant Dessie MacMahon started to climb the stairs of the big Georgian terrace in Herbert Place he pointed at the fifth tread, without stopping. Sergeant Stefan Gillespie did stop, bending to look down at the dark, densely patterned stair carpet; red, black, yellow, thistle-like flowers endlessly repeated. Only the chalk marks showed him where to look; a small brown stain stood out against yellow and red.

‘Blood.’

Dessie pointed at two of the uprights on the grey-painted banister. It was a long time since they had been painted. Again only traces of chalk made the smears of brown that could have been almost anything, or even nothing at all, immediately visible.

‘Blood.’

As he carried on Dessie’s left hand gestured at a chalk circle beside two crooked picture frames. They had been recently knocked askew; an oval, ebonised frame enclosing a sepia photograph of a heavily bearded man in a frock coat; a chipped, gilt square of plasterwork surrounding a sampler that was a map of Ireland with the counties outlined in green thread. Between them another streak of something brown marked the muddy swirls of the embossed wallpaper. Where the frames had moved they revealed that once the indeterminate colour of the wallpaper had been a startling emerald green. There was little wallpaper to be seen however.

The staircase wall, like the walls of the hall and the landing above it, was lined with pictures, maps, photographs; paintings of dogs and horses; faded prints of flowers; maps of Ireland, Britain, India, the Mediterranean. The mostly Victorian men and women who gazed out of the heaviest frames, with a mixture of confidence and disapproval, looked old whatever age they were. It was all heavy, dark, as if the images and colours lining the walls had faded into a uniform smog.

Dessie stopped as the staircase turned to the right, on to the landing, where the repeated pattern of the carpet stretched left and right along the corridor, between the gloomy, embossed walls and the grey-painted doors. It was lighter here though. A window gave on to Herbert Place below. Dessie was slightly breathless. A larger, elliptical chalk circle spread out on to the landing from the top stair; the bloodstains were clearer here.