Read A June of Ordinary Murders Online
Authors: Conor Brady
A June of Ordinary Murders
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CONTENTS
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For Ann, Neil and Conor, with great thanks for their love and patience
Many people, albeit unwittingly, have had a hand in forming the career of Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow. They include two good friends, now sadly departed: Gregory Allen, founder and first curator of the Garda Museum, and Tom O'Reilly, former Deputy Commissioner of the Garda Siochána. Much of their lore of Dublin policing is woven into the story.
The creation of Swallow also owes an amount to historian Jim O'Herlihy whose meticulous research provides an essential backdrop to any description of Irish policing prior to independence. Similarly, Professor Donal McCracken, in his biography of John Mallon, the head of G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, has put flesh and blood on key personalities in the Dublin Castle administration of the period.
Thus, even if Joe Swallow is an invention he is not unreal. I imagine that his ghost, along with the rest of the G-men, perhaps lingers in the courts and the narrow lanes around Dublin Castle. There may be something of their presence in the surviving brickwork of the old Police Office in the Lower Yard or in the granite of the Palace Street or Ship Street Gates.
My late friend and former colleague, Caroline Walsh, Literary Editor of
The Irish Times,
told me instantly, when she learned that the tale of Joe Swallow was in gestation, âsend it to Dermot Bolger for New Island.'
And so I did. I would like to thank Dermot for his immediate support and encouragement and likewise I wish to thank Edwin Higel and his team at New Island. They have been constant in their enthusiasm and professionalism.
All errors, inconsistencies and heresies in the story are, of course, of my own making.
Conor Brady
January 2012
The place where the bodies of the adult and the child were found was cool and shadowed before the sun burned off the morning mist.
It was on wooded ground that sloped down towards the river with a view across the city towards the mountains. Swallow knew it well. When the muttering constable with sleep in his eyes and clutching the crime report dragged himself up to the detective office from the Lower Yard of Dublin Castle, he could see it in his mind's eye.
This was where the boundary wall of the Phoenix Park met the granite pillars of the Chapelizod Gate, and where beech and pine trees formed a small, dense copse close by.
At this point, the trees are trained by the wind that funnels along the valley of the River Liffey towards Dublin Bay, inclining them eastward as if permanently pointing the way to the city. Outside the wall the ground falls away towards the river with the open fields and the village of Chapelizod beyond.
It was here, just inside the boundary wall of the park, that a keeper found the two bodies on the third morning of the extraordinary heatwave that settled on the island of Ireland in the third week of June, 1887.
In a few days' time the country, along with Great Britain's other territories and possessions across the globe, would mark the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria's ascent to the throne. It was as if the blue skies and sunlit days had been specially arranged to honour the Queen and Empress of half a century.
Though it was scarcely 7 o'clock, Swallow could feel the warmth of the coming day on the nape of his neck as the police side-car bucked and swayed along Chesterfield Avenue across the park to where the bodies had been found. The city temperature had touched 86 degrees yesterday. Now the strengthening morning sun presaged more of the same.
Dublin always took a more leisurely start to its morning, later than other cities in the industrious reign of Queen Victoria. At this early hour, the police vehicle was the only traffic on the broad, two-mile carriageway that bisects the Phoenix Park.
Swallow had put in a fetid night as duty sergeant at the G-Division detective office at Exchange Court. There were few places more cheerless in which to spend any night. Huddled in against the northern flank of Dublin Castle, chilled in winter and airless in summer, Exchange Court had the reputation of being the unhealthiest building in the maze of blocks and alleyways that had spread out around King John's original castle to house the administration of Ireland.
Dublin's police districts were denominated alphabetically. They went from the A, covering the crowded Liberties with its hungry alleys and courts and its primitive sanitation, to the F, serving the genteel coast from Blackrock to Dalkey with its spacious villas and elegant terraces.
The plain-clothes G Division based at Exchange Court was supposedly the elite of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Its members often grumbled over the paradox of its having probably the least salubrious accommodation of all the force.
The report of the discovery of the bodies â a man and a boy, it was said â had come in a few minutes before Swallow was due to finish his shift at 6 a.m. Now the sun's faint warmth hinted of the denied pleasure of sleep. Behind the police vehicle, the day was forming over Dublin.
Here the city seemed far behind. The spreading acres of the great municipal park â the largest in the Empire, it was said â were a pattern of greens. Beech, oak, chestnut and maple rose over a mantle of meadow-grass.
At the base of the soaring Wellington Monument, erected through public subscription to commemorate the Dublin-born victor of Waterloo, a herd of the park deer grazed the soft morning grass. Picking up the sound of the police carriage, the timid animals started to move away from the open space to the cover of the nearby trees.
Swallow turned to gaze back across the park towards the bay and the mountains. Harriet would be going to her examination desk at the teacher training college soon. The first of her summer tests would start at 9 o'clock. It would be a trying day for his young sister, cooped up in a stuffy hall with the sun beating down outside. He smiled inwardly imagining her impatience as she would fill foolscap pages through the morning with commentaries on Shakespeare and the English Romantic Poets.
As they came abreast of the Viceregal Lodge, the residence of the Queen's deputy in Ireland, the police driver hauled the car sharply to the left, veering away from the avenue onto a narrow lane known as Acres Road. The centrifugal force of the turn obliged Swallow to clutch the brass centre-rail of the vehicle, just above the embossed harp-and-crown emblem of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.
The two Bridewell constables he had collected from their beats planted booted feet against the car's duckboard to hold their balance. The younger nudged his companion and grinned.
âJesus, it's as well we didn't get any breakfast, what?'
By rights, Swallow reckoned, he should be at Maria Walsh's going through a plate of something substantial himself by now, and maybe addressing himself to a pint of Guinness's porter or a mellow Tullamore whiskey. For a moment he visualised himself in her parlour above the public house on Thomas Street, his current âdomicile', as police terminology referred to such arrangements.
Now the side-car was on a narrow, grassy track, leading across the open parkland.
There was a cluster of uniforms by the copse within sight of the Chapelizod Gate. A full-bearded sergeant and two constables from the A-Division station at Kilmainham stood beside a white-haired friar. In spite of the sunshine and the incipient heat of the morning, the priest looked pale and cold.
A few yards away, a park-keeper with a shotgun broken open across his arm was in conversation with some civilians. His gun dog sat obediently on the grass beside him, its nose twitching at the interesting scents of the morning air. From somewhere beyond the boundary wall, Swallow heard the morning squawks and clucks of barnyard fowl.