A June of Ordinary Murders (21 page)

‘No, Sir.'

‘Go down to Harcourt Street to Doctor Lafeyre's house. Tell him Detective Sergeant Swallow wants him up here. When you've done that, go to Lad Lane station. Tell the sergeant in charge that I'm confirming a likely murder here and we want manpower. Get the sergeant to contact the Commissioner's office in the Castle and say I want the official photographer here too.'

‘I will, Sir.'

Swallow turned to the other policeman.

‘Go across to the hotel. Get me something for a screen, blankets or sheets, with a few poles. Broomsticks will do if you can't get anything better. We'll need a bit of privacy here.'

The constable strode away towards the hotel. Swallow beckoned to the two bargemen.

‘Tell me what you saw.'

‘It was me that spotted her, Sor. I'm the stopman. We were just turnin' in for lock and I went to light me pipe. I looked inta the water and saw somethin' dark. So we pulled the boat outa the lock and…'

The master interjected. ‘Her clothes was caught be the tiller blade. I wint down in the water wid the gaff and pulled her in.'

‘No idea where you picked her up? Could she have been under the barge before you started up?'

The master shrugged. The stopman shook his head.

‘Did she come in easily?' Swallow asked. ‘Was she heavy?'

‘I think I know what you're gettin' at there, Sor,' the master said. ‘I've hauled me share o' corpses outa this canal. She's not a slight little thing, but she came out fairly easy.'

Swallow saw the constable coming from the Grand Canal Hotel, followed by two porters. One had an armful of bedsheets and the other carried half a dozen rough stakes, each about the height of a man.

‘Put them in a square around her. Leave a clearance of 6 or 7 feet for the doctor to work when he gets here,' he ordered the constable.

‘I want you to wait until we get some more police,' he told the bargemen. ‘We'll want to take statements from you both.'

The two bargemen looked despondent.

‘And I need to examine the vessel myself.'

‘Ah, Jaysus,' said the master. ‘We done all we could. We've a load a' malt to get ta Shannon Harbour be tomorra' noon. Sure haven't we told ye what we know? Ye can't keep us here settin' around all day.'

Swallow eyes drilled into his coarse face.

‘Be clear about this,' he said icily. ‘I want full, detailed statements from you and your stopman. Meanwhile, I want to check your barge from bow to stern. If there's a hint of trouble from you, you'll be on your way to Mountjoy or Kilmainham or the Bridewell until I'm done.'

‘It isn't meself, Sor,' the master said more respectfully, ‘it's the comp'ny and the cargo.'

Swallow raised his voice.

‘The company and your cargo can damned well wait. There's a woman lying dead there on the canal bank. Very likely she's been murdered. I don't give a curse for either the company or your bloody load of … whatever it is.'

‘Malt, Sor, ‘tis a load a' malt,' the man said apologetically and stepped back.

A brougham clattered across the cobbles of Charlemont Mall and drew to a halt by the grassy canal bank. Swallow recognised the driver as Scollan, Harry Lafeyre's man.

Lafeyre dropped smartly to the grass, hauling his bag from the carriage. Swallow led him through the makeshift screen of sheets and poles. The two men squatted beside the corpse, still covered with the constable's cape. The medical examiner reached across, lifted the cape and draped it on the nearest stake supporting the screen.

He surveyed the battered face and the gaping wound above the left temple.

‘Jesus, Joe, you're stacking up a lot of work. It's beginning to look like an epidemic. What do you know about this one?'

‘It's not a straightforward drowning. The bargemen found her down by the tiller blade and took her in with a gaff-hook. It seems the dress was caught by the blade and it ripped when they hauled on the gaff.'

The woman looked to be in her twenties. She was of average build. Swallow estimated her height at perhaps 5 feet and 3 or 4 inches. She had long, dark hair which now came down below her shoulders. Her sodden clothing was plain but of good-quality cotton, well finished. She wore a dark red dress, with buttons running to the neck, although the top three were missing. There were no shoes or stockings. There was no jewellery of any kind.

The right arm was flung forward of the head but the left hung by the side of the torso, hidden by the folds of the dress.

Swallow anticipated the medical examiner's anxiety to follow procedure. ‘She's been moved about. You're not going to lose any evidence by taking a closer look here.'

Lafeyre lifted the sodden cloth and raised the arm, buttoned to the wrist. He turned the hand palm upward and examined it, then he repeated the examination with the other hand.

‘Well at least this time I'd say we're right about the gender,' Lafeyre told him sardonically. ‘You've got a second dead woman within 72 hours. It's harder for me to guess the time of death here because of immersion in the water. There's some rigor mortis so she's certainly dead for several hours.'

‘Anything else you can tell me at this stage?' Swallow asked.

‘Not much that you can't see for yourself. There's plenty of hard work done by those hands,' Lafeyre observed. He raised a quizzical eyebrow to Swallow. ‘Why do you think she didn't drown?'

‘Well you can see that damned great wound on the head. And the bargemen said she was fairly light to haul in. If she was buoyant then her lungs weren't full of canal water.'

Lafeyre knelt beside the body, placed his right hand over his left, palms downwards and pressed hard on the woman's breastbone three times.

‘I'm inclined to agree. There's no great amount of excess fluid there. She might have been dead when she went in the water, but I won't be able to say definitely until we've got her to Marlborough Street for a full examination.'

He took a steel probe from his bag and folded back the flesh that had opened around the wound on the temple.

‘Again, I don't want to say anything with certainty until after I've done a full examination, but I'd wager that's the cause of death. Hard to know what caused that much damage, but it was a hell of a blow with something. There was a lot of force behind it. Some of the other marks might be post mortem – damage from the tiller blade or the walls of the locks.'

He replaced the police cape over the body.

Swallow's apprehensions were confirmed. What he had hoped might be a simple drowning case was beginning to look anything but simple.

‘I've a quiet day so I can do the post mortem this afternoon,' Lafeyre told Swallow. ‘If you want to be there, could we say 4 o'clock?'

A DMP side-car arrived with the official photographer. Swallow briefed him as he set up his field camera on its awkward tripod. A horse-drawn ambulance of the Dublin Fire Brigade had also drawn up behind Lafeyre's brougham.

‘First, I need pictures of the body and in particular of the wound on the head. Then get some general directional pictures showing the location and the barge and the lock.'

The camera man nodded and went about his task silently, starting with the corpse and closing in on the head wound. Swallow watched while he completed his task, then he called the uniformed sergeant.

‘We need a search of the canal, both banks, from here right down to the Grand Canal Dock. We don't have identification so we need anything that might be in the reeds or on the banks – a bag, shoes, stockings, a hat…'

The sergeant nodded.

‘Anything else?'

‘Dr Lafeyre is fairly sure this is a case of foul play. Make contact with the A Division and tell them to get a message out to Detective Feore. He's with the search teams near Chapelizod now but I need him as Book Man on this. I'll want a full report on the search when you're done.'

Lafeyre gestured to the ambulance attendants. They stepped forward carrying a canvas stretcher.

‘The photography seems to be completed here. Bring her down to the morgue at Marlborough Street. I'll be doing a post mortem in the afternoon.'

The ambulance men went about their task. A few moments later they emerged from behind the screen, one at either end of the stretcher. The constables formed a phalanx as the body was carried out.

The ambulance men halted beside their vehicle. The constable who had placed his cape over the body bent to retrieve it, leaving the corpse momentarily visible.

There was a scream from somewhere among the onlookers. A thin, young woman with a shawl drawn around her shoulders was staring with a look of horror at the body on the stretcher.

She screamed again.

‘Oh Jesus … Oh Jesus … it's Sarah.'

SIXTEEN

Upwards of a score of funerals took place on the hot Monday morning at Mount Prospect Cemetery, Glasnevin, just north of the city. At one stage, five separate cortèges were drawn up on the Finglas Road awaiting their turn to be cleared through the gates of the necropolis by the sweating officials in their blue tunics and top hats.

The mortality rate had risen as the extraordinary heat of the previous week took its toll. Inevitably, in the poorer districts where primitive sanitation and overcrowding prevailed, the casualties tended to be the old and the very young. The other big city cemeteries serving Dublin and Kingstown, Mount Jerome and Dean's Grange, were to be busy all day as well.

Shortly after 11 o'clock, the hearse carrying the remains of Cecilia Downes passed through the village of Phibsborough and along the Finglas Road. The glass-panelled hearse was drawn by four jet-black, plumed horses. Men and women who stood by the roadside to watch the unusually fine funeral procession could see that the coffin inside was made of polished oak, set with solid brass handles.

A black phaeton, draped with mourning silks, followed immediately behind. Dublin funeral protocol required that the first carriage after the hearse should carry the chief mourners. That dubious distinction in this case belonged to Charlie Vanucchi and Vinny Cussen. The two criminals, incongruously dark-suited and top-hatted, sat grimly facing forward and as far apart as possible on the phaeton's padded leather seat.

Father Laurence from the Franciscan monastery at Merchants' Quay sat opposite the two men. At Ces Downes's instruction there had been no funeral Mass or church service. She had insisted that she would be brought directly from her house at Francis Street to Glasnevin.

Half a dozen clarences and broughams followed immediately behind the lead mourning car. The occupants were a mixed lot. Some of the men wore dark suits as propriety demanded, but elsewhere loud checks and coloured waistcoats stood out.

Many of the women were equally indecorous with bright dresses, summer parasols and floral hats. Near St Peter's Church at Phibsborough, passers-by saw one female mourner cheerfully wave a gin bottle through a brougham's curtained window.

Behind the closed carriages came a trailing procession of perhaps 40 side-cars, traps and Ringsend Cars. They stretched in a disorderly gaggle along the road back towards the city. Men and women and even a few children perched on the high seats or squeezed into the spaces between. Others clung to the sideboards or maintained a precarious grip on the baggage straps.

The pretence at solemnity receded further along the procession. A medley of drinking songs rose from two of the cars. Most of the passengers clutched bottles or jugs of drink. Clay pipes and cigars were passed around. At one point on the Finglas Road a group of women descended from the caravan to dance a jig in the dust, waving their skirts and whooping as a fiddler played away from the back of a Ringsend Car.

Two G-men watched from a vantage point opposite the main gate to the cemetery. There were slurred greetings and hoots from the mourners, but there was no disorder.

Technically the policemen might have tried to make arrests for public drunkenness. One officer had a vague idea that there was a specific offence of being under the influence in a burial ground or a place of worship. The officers agreed, however, that Ces Downes's funeral was not an occasion upon which to test their knowledge of the law on public order.

The pallbearers, fronted by Vinny Cussen and Charlie Vanucchi, carried Ces Downes's coffin to what the cemetery authorities described as a ‘first-class grave,' being prominently located close to one of the main wide pathways.

At the graveside, after Ces Downes's coffin had been lowered into the ground, Father Laurence recited the prayers for the dead and led the attendance in a decade of the rosary. Three gravediggers moved forward and began to shovel the clay over the coffin. The mourners, led by Vanucchi and Cussen, started to move away towards the cemetery gates.

Half an hour after Ces Downes's mourners had left Glasnevin, another quite different kind of funeral party made its way along a side avenue to one of the paupers' plots at the northern end of the cemetery.

The cortège of the woman and the child whose bodies had been found at the Chapelizod Gate three days previously consisted of just two vehicles, each drawn by a single horse. The lead vehicle was a closed cart such as might be used by a merchant to deliver groceries or other goods. The second vehicle was a Dublin Metropolitan Police side-car with a driver and a solitary plain-clothes policeman seated beside him.

Two hours earlier, a jury of nine shopkeepers, tradesmen and publicans had returned a verdict of death as a result of gunshot on the unknown woman and child. The verdict enabled the coroner to release the bodies for burial.

The small cortège stopped at a point where four or five cemetery labourers lounged, smoking and talking, around a makeshift trestle. The driver of the closed cart dismounted and opened the doors at the back, then he beckoned the labourers to help him to carry down the two plain-box coffins that were inside.