The City of Strangers

‘She must have been carried out the bedroom. But the body was put down here a moment. There’s more blood on the walls up there, and on the pictures.’ Dessie gestured to the left, along the corridor, where several more prints and photographs hung at odd angles. ‘Either he put her down or he dropped her.’

Stefan looked. Dessie walked on past two closed doors.

The third door was open. Through it was a big bedroom as cluttered and claustrophobic as the hall and the landing. There were clear signs of a struggle: smashed ornaments, pictures knocked off the walls, a broken chair, a table on its side, sheets and blankets pulled across the big bed on to the floor. But where the smell in the hallway and on the landing was of polish and dust and years of airlessness, the smell here was of smoke and burnt wood; not strong but acrid and sharp.

Dessie took out a packet of Sweet Afton and lit a cigarette. Stefan walked into the centre of the room. There were two small rugs, though it was clear the rest of the floor had been covered until recently too. The floorboards were grimy with age but they had only been varnished at the edges of the room. A carpet must have covered the area in front of the bed, though it wasn’t there now. Close to the bottom of the bed the floorboards were blacker than elsewhere, charred. Stefan looked at the black patch and bent down. He rubbed something that was like charcoal on to his fingers.

‘Just in time, I’d say.’

Dessie nodded. ‘When the maid came in there was an electric fire on. It must have been going full pelt for a couple of days. The boards were starting to burn underneath. If she hadn’t come back when she did the place would have gone up so. She threw a bucket of water over it.’ He laughed and drew in some more smoke. ‘She fused the whole house, but it did the trick.’

‘So do you think it was deliberate? Starting a fire?’

‘I’d say not,’ replied Dessie. ‘There’d have to be better ways to do that. No, this was where she was killed and there was a lot of blood. Someone tried to clean it up. There’s soap mixed with the blood. The story is he put the fire on to dry the floor, then left. But as he never came back –’

Stefan was still looking down at the floor.

‘What happened to the carpet?’

‘The State Pathologist took some of the rugs and the bedclothes, but the carpet had gone already. Your man must have had it. It would have been soaked looking at what’s round the room. Maybe he brought it with him. Maybe he wrapped the body in it. There’s not a lot of blood in the car. She was on the back seat, so she must have been covered in something anyway.’

‘So with all this blood – she was stabbed? Is there a weapon?’

‘I’ll show you where the axe was. We’ll go out the back way.’

The garden that led down to the mews at the back of the house in Herbert Place was neatly kept, but it was bare and grey. Squares of grass and small, dark rhododendrons; tightly clipped bushes took up the flower beds. When the spring came there would be few enough flowers to give colour. Dessie pointed out several chalk-marked stains on the stone paved path that led to the two-storey mews; a little more blood to mark where the body had been half-dragged and half-carried from the house.

They walked through a door into the gutted stables that had once housed the family’s horses, and now smelt of the leaked engine oil that stained the stone floor. There were a couple of bicycles, some garden tools, a workbench full of spanners and wrenches, rusty and cobwebbed. Against one wall was a pile of cut turf, with sticks for the fires stacked beside it. Dessie stood by the turf and kicked at it.

‘There was a small hatchet here, under a pile of turf. There’s a gardener comes in now and again. He uses it for splitting wood for a bit of kindling. So it was kept in the garage. It had a good wash but there was still blood on it. They think it was maybe hot water, so instead of the blood running away it coagulated. They reckon it must be what killed her though.’

He walked across the empty garage to the double doors.

‘Mrs Harris’s car was kept in here. So he must have brought the body in, then shoved her on to the back seat. Bit tight in a Baby Austin. Timings aren’t very clear. Only one sighting of the car. It was probably dark when he left.’

Detective Sergeant MacMahon opened one of the doors.

‘Evening, night?’ asked Stefan as they walked out into the lane that ran behind Herbert Place. It was almost empty, as it must have been then.

‘Not late. Seven, maybe eight o’clock.’

Two boys were walking slowly along the lane towards Mount Street. Stefan Gillespie watched them for a moment as Dessie lit another cigarette. They were ten or eleven, one of them dragging a cart behind him, the base of an old pram, stacked with broken boxes and cardboard.

He recognised the boys’ slow, patient walk from the years he had spent tramping the streets of Dublin as a guard. There were thousands of children just like them. He recognised the odd combination of resignation and anticipation in the way they moved, their eyes alert for any piece of wood, anything that would burn, anything that would keep a fire going in the tenement where there was never any money for coal or turf, or anything else. He recognised the grey clothes drained of any colour they might once have had, too big on one boy, too small on the other, that had been handed down more times than anyone could remember. He knew the damp, dark, rotten, infested houses that Éamon de Valera’s new Ireland had still not touched, and he knew the cold, crowded room in one of those houses that the boys would live in.

Suddenly one of them darted across the lane with a shout to grab the prize of half of an orange box. They were laughing. And after the blood and the well-heeled claustrophobia of the house where Leticia Harris had been hacked to death, their laughter was a reassuring sound. Stefan smiled, turning back to Dessie.

‘So where is she?’

Sergeant MacMahon shrugged, drawing on his Sweet Afton.

‘We’ve got a sweepstake going at the Castle. They reckon it was high tide when the old lady was thrown in the sea. My money’s on Scotland.’

4. Corbawn Lane

Corbawn Lane was a long, straight road that led from the village of Shankill to the sea. There were dark hedges and closely planted trees on both sides of the lane; the trees reached up and arched across the road almost the whole length, sometimes meeting in the middle. Even with the trees not yet in leaf, the straight line of the lane created the effect of a tunnel out of the skeleton branches.

Eight miles south of Dublin, Shankill was a place of small farms and country houses, just beyond the reach of the city’s slowly spreading suburbia. Around the village clusters of new bungalows payed homage to a still very English idea of what it was to live near the sea, but they were also a statement that the city had its eye on Shankill’s fields and estates. Yet Corbawn Lane was still a long way from Dublin. Every so often a break in one of the long hedges announced that somewhere among the trees there was a big house: Dorney Court, Lisnalurg, Clarebeg, then across the bridge over the railway, Llanmawr, Eaton Brae, and then, where the lane finally ended, hard against the sea and the small cliff beyond, the turning to the right, past the last lodge, into the last house called Clifton.

Several cars were parked in front of the house, among them the Austin that Dessie MacMahon had driven down from Herbert Place.

It was a grey house; the grey stucco beneath the grey-black roof was grubbily spotted with algae and lichen in various shades of grey, and at the corners of the house it was starting to crumble away. The house itself was empty; it had been empty for a long time. The big downstairs windows that looked out over the garden to the sea were covered by boards that had themselves become grey and stained over the years; upstairs the curtains were closed.

The gardens that led across the lawn to a row of trees and the sea were controlled rather than cared for; someone came to cut the grass and stop the borders going wild but that was all.

Stefan Gillespie and Dessie MacMahon stood at the far side of the garden where a thick hedge separated it from the low cliffs and the sea beyond. The hedge was smashed and broken; the grass around it was muddy and churned; there were the deep ruts of car tyres that had been spinning and spinning aimlessly there.

‘I told you about the Baby Austin Mrs Harris drove. She’d only had it three months. It was her pride and joy apparently. She seems to have spent most of those three months driving it around Dublin. And this is where they found it, jammed into the hedge right here. The night she disappeared a friend of hers saw the car coming out of Herbert Place and turning on to Baggot Street. The woman thinks it was Owen Harris who was driving it.’

‘So he brought it here? With the body in the back?’ said Stefan.

‘It’s hard to see it any other way. He had to get rid of it. He must have decided the sea was his best bet. It wasn’t such a daft idea either. She hasn’t been found. Whether he was trying to get the car into the sea as well –’

They both looked up for a moment. There was the drone of an aircraft overhead. A small plane was following the coast, northwards towards Dublin. Across the garden hedge where the cliff dropped down to the beach below, uniformed guards were walking along at the water’s edge, their eyes fixed on the sand and rock; offshore there were two small boats. The beach had been searched and re-searched, but every day it was searched again with the tides in case the sea gave anything up.

‘We’re up and down the whole east coast,’ said Dessie, ‘from Wexford right up to the North. They’re looking in Wales, Scotland, the Lancashire coast. Not a sign of her.’

‘It’s going to be hard work keeping all that quiet, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a missing woman, that’s all anybody’s saying.’

‘So why here?’ asked Stefan.

‘It was the family house. Where Harris lived when he was a lad, before the old man and the old lady went their ways. They’d been living apart for years. The father still owns it. So the assumption is Owen Harris knew it, that’s the long and the short of it. And he knew it was empty.’

‘And he tried to drive straight through the hedge?’

‘That wasn’t such a good idea. It’s some hedge. And he got it stuck. It went through so far, but it couldn’t get any further. Then the wheels started to spin and it wouldn’t move at all. He couldn’t go forward and he couldn’t back out. So the story is he got her out of the car and dragged her through the hedge. He pulled her, carried her, whatever he did, and he got her down on to the rocks. Then he shoved her off. It was high tide. Whether that was luck or he knew – I guess he’ll tell us that himself, eventually. It did the job. The problem was the car. Nothing was going to move it. Or get the blood off the back seat. He had no choice. He just left it here and he went home …’

‘Where’s the car now?’

‘It’s in the garage at Dublin Castle. They’ve had a good go at it, the State Pathologist and the rest. It’s given us more blood and it makes it hard to argue Owen Harris wasn’t here. Not that he seems to have gone to great lengths to hide that. He stopped a car at the top of Corbawn Lane by the AA box and asked the feller for a ride into town. He got dropped in Ballsbridge.’

‘Jesus, what the hell did he look like by then?’ Stefan shook his head.

‘Let’s say he made an impression. It was a couple, a man and a woman. I think when he walked out in front of the car they were too scared not to give him a lift. He told them he was an Englishman from Tunbridge Wells, on holiday. They had no idea what he’d done of course, but I think they were relieved to reach Ballsbridge in one piece. The conversation was a bit one-sided, but they said he apologised for the Norman invasion, the Famine, the Act of Union, the Black and Tans, and the Economic War, and said he hoped political developments would bring a new dawn in Anglo-Irish relations.’ Dessie laughed. ‘For some reason “new dawn” did stick.’

Stefan was laughing too.

Sergeant MacMahon took out a cigarette, cupping his hands to light it.

‘So does anyone know what it was all about?’

‘Apart from the fact that the mother and son were both barking?’

‘And were they?’ asked Stefan.

‘They were always fighting the peace out, according to the maid anyway. Mrs Harris was a great one for throwing the delft across the room.’

‘Just an ordinary Irish family then.’

‘Well, there was definitely something wrong upstairs,’ said Dessie. ‘She’d come out of a convalescent home six weeks ago. She’d been in there a month. For the rest, according to Doctor Harris. Superintendent Gregory likes to refer to him as the “estranged” husband. They were all a bit strange if you ask me. Anyway, the doctor says she was very highly strung. Fragile nerves. She needed rests like that quite a lot. This time it was after she’d broken into the old fella’s house and stolen a canteen of cutlery. She locked herself in her bedroom with it for three days.’

‘When did the marriage break up?’

‘They hadn’t lived together since Owen Harris was seven. That’s when they were all here. The old man’s in Pembroke Road now. He owns the house in Herbert Place too. She didn’t have any money. He kept the both of them.’

‘So Owen Harris had a row with his mammy and killed her?’ Stefan frowned. ‘And that’s it. What did she do, throw one plate too many at him?’

‘Maybe we’ll find out when we get him back,’ replied Sergeant MacMahon. ‘The maid says they were rowing about money. He wanted some and she wouldn’t give it to him. It was to do with this theatre tour in America, the Gate. The actors had to stump up their own fares. So that’s what he needed it for.’

‘And she wasn’t having it?’

‘There wasn’t a lot of spare money about. She lived on what her husband gave her. He wouldn’t be a man to throw it about, so they say.’

‘But there was money, wasn’t there?’ continued Stefan.

‘There was a bit Mrs Harris had from working for the Hospitals’ Sweepstake. She did a lot of that, but they only paid her expenses. It’s meant to be charity. She had an office in a room at the back of the house, and a secretary came in sometimes to do a bit of typing. That’s it. There wouldn’t have been any sort of living in it at all. Money was the main topic of conversation at Herbert Place, well, how Mrs Harris never had any was.’

‘She had a brand new car!’

‘She did so,’ said Dessie, ‘and in a shoebox on top of the wardrobe in her bedroom, she had a box with six hundred and seventeen pounds in it.’

‘That doesn’t make much sense.’

Dessie shrugged; it didn’t.

‘So where did that come from?’

‘Same place as the car.’

‘Doctor Harris didn’t buy her that then?’

‘No. She bought it herself.’

‘And –’

‘And what? Nobody seems bothered about it at the Castle.’

Stefan was surprised. He would have wanted to know.

‘So Harris killed his mother because she wouldn’t give him the money he wanted, and then left six hundred pounds sitting on top of the wardrobe?’

‘The assumption is he didn’t know it was there.’

‘But he did get the money to pay for the boat to New York?’

Sergeant MacMahon shrugged again. Although he had offered no opinions, Stefan knew that he didn’t think much of the investigation.

‘Couldn’t he have got that from the father?’

‘No. The old man thinks he’s a waster. As for the acting, it’s a joke as far as he’s concerned. I’ve only seen the old feller once. Superintendent Gregory brought him to Herbert Place. I wouldn’t say he had much to do with them any more, the lad or his mother. He gave them both an allowance of some sort, as little as he could get away with, that’s the word.’

Stefan Gillespie was looking down at the hedge and the tyre tracks.

‘Did anyone know she had money?’

‘She was always short. Bills were never paid. But she had cash when she wanted it. No one else is very interested in what the maid had to say, but Mrs Harris bought clothes she never wore and paid a lot for them. She was fond of fur as well. And when she bought the Austin Seven she paid cash. When she went out to a restaurant with her friends she didn’t just go anywhere. And she always paid her share too.’

‘You got on well with the maid, did you?’ smiled Stefan.

‘They had her sitting around at Dublin Castle long enough.’

‘So where does she think the money came from?’

‘I wasn’t in on any of the interviews.’

‘But you asked her, Dessie, come on!’

‘She doesn’t have much doubt about it. The old lady was fiddling the Sweepstake. She collected up the money that came in from abroad. It went to a post office box, but the post office delivered it to Herbert Place. Some days there’d be sackfuls, from all over, England, America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, cheques, postal orders, and cash. Hundreds of pounds. She took the cheques into a bank in Baggot Street, cashed the postal orders, and then delivered it all to the Sweepstake office. She kept accounts, but I don’t know how they were checked. It wouldn’t have been hard to skim a bit off.’

‘And Superintendent Gregory isn’t looking at that?’ asked Stefan.

‘They’ve decided they know what happened. The eejit son killed her and chucked her in the sea. It’s as far as anyone needs to look. Or wants to.’

Stefan was puzzled, even after everything Dessie had said.

‘And how many detectives are there on this?’

‘They’re looking for the body, Sarge.’ Dessie laughed again. He was still calling Stefan ‘Sarge’, though he was now a sergeant himself; old habits. He was enjoying this conversation; old habits, old times. ‘Nobody’s got any doubt about what happened. I don’t know whether Owen Harris really thinks he’s coming home for a chat, but I’d say he could be coming back for the long drop. As for the Sweepstake business, it’s nothing to do with anything, I’ve been told. I’m not saying they’ve got it wrong, but no one wants to know any more. If he was here he must have been here with the body.’

Stefan nodded. Maybe there were other things to find out. Maybe for some reason there were things to find out that nobody really wanted to look into. But there were enough facts to make it hard to see beyond Owen Harris killing his mother and dumping her body out here.

He looked at the sea for a moment. He knew the smell of all this now. There were people who mattered in it. There were lids to be kept on things. There was a show to put on at New York’s World’s Fair that was far more important than a squalid and brutal murder in Ireland. There were reputations riding on it. There were newspaper headlines that Ireland’s hard-earned money had bought. Now there was the country’s Hospitals’ Sweepstake too; it brought in money the country didn’t have, to pay for hospitals it desperately needed, money from all over the world; it was money that would dry up in the face of newspaper headlines about laziness, incompetence, fraud. Stefan could see now why the investigation was in the hands of the Special Branch.

There was a crime to solve that seemed to have an easy, ready solution. But it had to be solved in a way that meant it was contained and controlled. Special Branch was there to make sure there was no spillage. He was a part of the politics now.

The Garda Commissioner was sending him to New York because he could bring Harris back to Ireland with the lid firmly on; without giving him the slightest idea he might be coming home to hang.

‘Enjoying yourself, Sergeant Gillespie?’

Stefan turned at the sound of a voice behind him. Introductions were unnecessary. Superintendent Gregory knew who he was, that was clear.

‘It’ll be a treat for you, coming all the way to Dublin on the train.’

Terry Gregory was in his mid-fifties, his face round and red in the way that marked out detectives who spent more time in the pub than the office. He wore a black overcoat that was too small for him, a brown trilby that was too big. The smile on his face was temporary; it would change to a sneer shortly. But the smile, like the imminent sneer, advertised displeasure.

Behind him stood two detectives in belted raincoats and hats, like leftovers from an IRA demob sale. They were there because Special Branch superintendents never travelled alone. It would not be their job to speak.

‘So, you’ve been specially asked for by Mr Mac Liammóir?’

‘It seems that way, sir.’

‘Close to him are you?’

‘I’ve met him.’

‘You’d be well advised to guard your backs with this one, lads.’

The two detectives laughed; that was one of their jobs.

‘Still, you’re down in Wicklow with the mountainy men and the sheep shaggers, so maybe you’ll be just the man to take our Mr Harris in hand. So what’s it about, Sergeant Gillespie? That’s what I’d like to know. What are you doing here, and why the fuck is Ned Broy sending you to New York? You’re only a culchie station sergeant who couldn’t make it as a detective.’

‘I’m here because I’ve been told to be here, sir.’

‘And I’ve told Ned Broy what I think about it.’

‘He did say something about that.’

‘I see, you think you’re a clever fucker as well, do you?’

Stefan said nothing. Gregory turned to Dessie.

‘And what the hell are you doing?’

‘Nothing, sir,’ replied Detective Sergeant MacMahon.

‘No, nothing is what I told you to do, Dessie, but what you’ve been doing is taking our farmer’s boy on a scene-of-crime tour, as if he’s got something to do with this investigation.’

He swung round to Stefan again; any trace of a smile was gone now.

‘I don’t like people interfering with what I do. I don’t care if they come from Garda HQ or the Taoiseach’s office, it pisses me off. Now they’re coming from the poofs’ paradise at the fucking Gate Theatre. I’m stuck with you because Ned Broy hasn’t got the balls to tell the politicians where to put it. So this is what you do, Stevie boy. You get the plane, you look out the window with your eyes agog, and you go to New York. You get back on the plane with Harris and sit next to him until you get off at Foynes next week. I’ll be there, and when you’ve handed him over to me, you get the next train back to Baltinglass. In between you don’t ask him anything, you don’t talk about what happened, about Mrs Harris’s death, about how he killed her, what he did with the body, where he went, who he saw, who he spoke to. You do nothing that could fuck this up. You’re the courier and he’s the parcel. Is that clear enough?’

‘I’d say so. But what do I do about him talking to me?’

Superintendent Gregory had given Sergeant Gillespie his orders. He wasn’t asking to have a conversation about it. ‘You tell him to shut up too.’

‘What about the Gate?’ asked Stefan quietly but insistently.

‘Would you like me to write it down, Sergeant?’

‘He’s got friends there. He’s been with them since the day after the murder. He’s been shut in a hotel room with some of them since he agreed to come back to Ireland. Wouldn’t you want to know what he’s been saying?’

‘I’m sorry, Stevie, I didn’t realise Ned told you to take over.’

‘It’s a simple question, sir.’ Stefan allowed his irritation to show.

Terry Gregory walked forward until he was only inches from him. For the first time he spoke very quietly. The whiskey was strong on his breath.

‘You might not have much of a job down there, Sergeant, but if you screw this up, you’ll be sitting on an island off the Atlantic till the day you draw your pension. Nobody wants to know what you think. Now fuck off.’

He spun round and strode rapidly across the grass. The Special Branch detectives followed him. There was only the sound of the sea breaking slowly, rhythmically on the rocks below. Dessie MacMahon too started back towards the house.

Stefan was still for a moment. It was a peaceful place. The thought of what had happened barely a week ago seemed to collide in his mind with the image of a small boy playing in the garden, running down to the sea. He looked at the boarded-up French windows and remembered a photograph on the bloodstained wall at Herbert Place. He had barely noticed it, yet it had stayed in his head; a boy, freckled, in shorts and a white shirt and sandals, smiling by the same big windows, wide open then, pulling a wooden cart full of sand.