The City of Shadows (19 page)

Stefan and Hannah sat in Neary's in Chatham Street and said very little. She didn't talk about what had happened to Susan, only about their friendship, half-remembered events, unfinished stories, times and places and people she was trying to bring back, just for a moment. Some of the time she said nothing at all and for a while he felt he had to speak. When he tried to ask her about herself, about Palestine, about what she did, where she lived, her replies didn't tell him anything. Eventually she shook her head and laughed.

‘You don't have to say anything when there's nothing to say.'

‘I'm sorry. I should know that. It was always my line.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘When Maeve died, and afterwards, for ages. I couldn't move for people talking to me. It was as if they'd organised themselves into shifts. One went and there'd be someone else. If it wasn't my mother or father, it was a stream of neighbours, or some cousin or aunt I hadn't seen for years. “Whatever you do, don't leave him on his own. And keep him talking!”'

‘It's only because people care.'

‘And Jesus, how they care! They all felt so bad about how I felt I ended up comforting them! I swear I'd never seen some of them in my life.'

‘That's a terrible thing to say!' she said, still smiling.

‘Sometimes people need to know when to shut up.'

‘So are you going to shut up now?'

‘If that's what you want, Hannah.'

‘I suppose I'm running away from all that a bit.' She was more serious again. The strain in her face couldn't be hidden by a smile for very long. ‘All the people I know, the people we grew up with. It's like you said. They'll be in and out of Lennox Street tomorrow, and we'll sit and say the same things, over and over. I will do it, of course I will. I will sit there. But not tonight.'

Stefan nodded.

‘Sometimes it was easier being with people I didn't really know.'

‘That's not what I meant, Stefan.'

He was aware it was the first time she had called him that.

‘It doesn't feel like I don't know you.'

Stefan reached out and took her hand. She held his hand tightly.

‘It doesn't for me either. It hasn't from the first time we met.'

‘Time, please! Let's have you two out of here!' The barman's voice boomed across the room in their direction. The glasses were rapidly snatched off the table. They looked round, laughing. The bar had been full when they came in two hours earlier. Now they were the only people left.

As they walked out of the pub towards Grafton Street it was bitterly cold. The long street of Christmas shop windows was almost empty now.

‘Do you want to get a taxi, Hannah?'

He was already turning towards Stephen's Green and the taxi rank.

‘No.'

‘I'll walk home with you then.'

‘I don't think I'll go home,' she replied quietly, gently, her eyes fixed on his. She was shivering. She put her arm through his, pulling herself closer to him. It was not what he expected, but it wouldn't be true to say he hadn't thought about it, and suddenly it seemed not unexpected at all. Perhaps it had been clear from the beginning, to both of them, and now there was a need for comfort that had pushed away all the reasons why it wouldn't happen. There was nothing they needed to say to each other. They turned away from Stephen's Green and walked on, down towards Nassau Street.

The next morning Stefan Gillespie took the train to Carlow Town. It was a journey to a familiar place; the nearest big town to Baltinglass. Until Naas, the railway followed the route he took going home, but where the line branched away towards the Wicklow Mountains, he carried on now to Kildare Town and the flat plain of the Curragh and down into the neat pastureland of County Carlow. He fixed his mind on the day's work, but it wasn't easy. It was one thing to tell himself he expected nothing from Hannah after the night they'd spent together; it was another to believe it.

Her mood had been very different that morning. The questions about Susan's murder had come faster than his answers. Why was he holding things back? Why was he trawling the streets of Dublin when he should be on the boat to England by now, across the Channel, and on a train to Danzig? Wasn't it the priest he needed to question about Susan above everything else? And he knew it was. He also knew why nobody, from the Garda Commissioner down, would be rushing to buy his train ticket. He was investigating the deaths of a woman and a man that a lot of people, his superiors among them, would rather had lain undiscovered on the mountainside at Kilmashogue. Then, quite abruptly, the questions had stopped. She had to go. She walked across to him and kissed him. She rested her head on his shoulder. It was an expression of support, and something more, of tenderness. And then the room was very empty. She was gone.

As Stefan looked out from the train at the green fields of Carlow, Hannah Rosen was making tea in Brian Field's kitchen, steeling herself for a long day talking to all the people who would come through his door. But in her head there was another conversation going on. Lying in Stefan's bed that morning, before he woke up, listening to the sounds of Dublin outside, she knew how much this was still her city. The ease she felt with Stefan, even in the face of her best friend's death, went deeper than she wanted to admit. She could never tell Benny what she was feeling, and not only because of what had happened between her and Stefan. He would be hurt by that, but he would understand. What he wouldn't understand were her thoughts as she listened to Dublin, rattling and clattering and cursing beyond the window of the scruffy room in Nassau Street. The creation of Israel drove Benny Jacobson with a relentless passion that left no space for sentimental attachments to the past. And she was full of those attachments now. That was the betrayal he wouldn't forgive. This was still where she belonged. Her head had made a decision about what her life should be; her heart had not.

Stefan went straight from Carlow Station to the Garda barracks in Tullow Street to pay his respects to Superintendent Flynn, who wanted to be remembered to his father and seemed in quite the mood to settle down for a chat about country policing and metropolitan crime. That is until he got the whiff of unnatural practices in his nostrils and found his presence elsewhere was more urgently required than anticipated. Stefan would want to talk to the parents, of course. Wouldn't it be best if he got on with it? He knew the town like the back of his hand – there was no need for the superintendent's officers to get involved, was there? Stefan just smiled. No, there wasn't.

He walked the length of Tullow Street and turned into Dublin Street at the bottom. The tobacconist's was on the left. He remembered it, but when he walked inside the memory was much stronger. The smell of the place, a comfortable smell of sweetness and smoke reminded him of his grandfather. He had bought Christmas presents for him there, a half ounce of tobacco, some pipe cleaners. But the moment Mr Walsh showed him through the shop into the living room behind it, the warmth was gone. There was only empty space, somehow not quite filled by the table and the two wooden chairs, the two-seater settee and the armchair, and the heavy mahogany sideboard that was too big for the room. It was a dark room and although the day was cold, there was no fire in the grate. There was a photograph of a wedding on the mantelpiece – Mr and Mrs Walsh's – and on either side of it were oval framed photographs of two couples who must have been Vincent's grandparents. Above the fireplace too was a black-framed picture of the Sacred Heart. ‘Blessed be the home in which my heart is exposed.'

Somehow it felt less like a home than the shop had. That was where they spoke to people. Stefan could feel that when Mr and Mrs Walsh walked back through the door from the tobacconist's there weren't many words. No one ever said much in this room. He learned that Vincent had been their only child, yet there was no photograph; when he asked for one they looked at each other uncertainly, as if they weren't sure where to find such a thing. Mrs Walsh made no move. A slight nod of her head gave her husband permission to act.

He went to the sideboard and opened a door, with the key that was in the lock. The lock was stiff; the door was rarely opened. He took out a biscuit tin with a picture of the Rock of Cashel on the lid. He opened it carefully and looked through the contents, hunched over the sideboard. He produced a small cardboard frame with a photograph in it; R & F Beard, Photographers, Tullow Street, Carlow. It was a picture of a young man of sixteen or seventeen. He wore a dark suit jacket, a white collar that was too big for him, and a striped tie. He wasn't smiling. There was a similar photograph of Stefan on the wall in the kitchen at Kilranelagh. He had gone to the photographer's shop in Tullow Street the summer before he started at Trinity College; his mother wanted a photograph of him in the dark suit that looked so much like Vincent Walsh's. He had sat in the same chair, in front of the same stained sheet in Mr Beard's studio. Mr Beard would have said the same things and made the same jokes. Stefan promised he would return the photograph as soon as he could. Mr and Mrs Walsh didn't reply.

His questions were answered with as few words as were needed. They had not seen their son for over three years. He had left home to work in Dublin in the summer of 1930. He had come home twice. The last time had been Christmas, 1931. He went back to Dublin that Stephen's Day and it was the last contact they'd had with him. There was nothing to find out here. They could have understood nothing of their son's life. They knew just enough to ensure it was never spoken about. Stefan could almost feel, through the years between, the long silence that final Christmas must have been for all three of them. As he walked from the shop out into the street, it was as if the ghost of that Stephen's Day past, when Vincent Walsh had left his home for the last time, still hovered in the tobacconist's doorway. Whatever the shop had meant to Vincent then, once it must have held the sounds and scents and images of a childhood that wasn't always silent and empty and cold.

They hadn't asked about his body. Stefan didn't have to explain that there was nothing for them to see or identify, nothing he would want a mother and father to look at. He told them they would be able to make funeral arrangements before long, perhaps in January. They nodded. They would do what they needed to do. There would be no wake. There would be no line of customers and friends and neighbours and family to follow the coffin the few hundred yards along Dublin Street, past the pillared court house into College Street, past the seminary; or to sit with it in the Cathedral of the Assumption overnight. The Mass for the Dead would be spoken to a handful of people. Vincent Walsh would be buried with as much shame as sorrow. Afterwards, his mother and father would sit in the room behind the shop and say nothing. They had mourned for their son long before his death.

*

Dessie MacMahon was a lot more comfortable in Carolan's Bar than he had been at the Gate Theatre. Apart from the fact that Billy Donnelly didn't need to be asked to put two hot whiskeys in front of him and Sergeant Gillespie, you knew who was who in here, and more to the point, who was what. Any man you found drinking in Carolan's was queer and that kind of clarity seemed to Dessie to be only proper. Besides which, you could treat them like queers. A bit of craic was fine. Didn't some of them have a way of making you split your sides sometimes? But up at the Gate you needed to watch yourself. You couldn't know who was queer and who wasn't and nobody seemed the least bit bothered about it. That couldn't be right. However, as Stefan questioned Billy Donnelly, the publican was less forthcoming about Vincent Walsh than he was with the drinks. He took the news that Vincent's body had been found with hardly a change in his sour expression. Maybe his eyes closed for just a moment, but it was hard not to feel that this didn't come as news at all.

‘He was living here?' said Stefan.

‘He worked for me. He'd a room upstairs.'

‘How long?'

‘Maybe a year.'

‘You knew him well then.'

Billy looked across the bar at the last of his departing customers. It was barely one o'clock and the pub never did do much daytime trade, but the presence of two detectives was enough to frighten off what there was.

‘You're costing me money. Are you stopping long?'

‘Tell me about the night of the Eucharistic Mass,' continued Stefan. It was not a question Billy expected, and if the news of Vincent's death hadn't seemed to surprise him very much, those words clearly did. He frowned.

‘You'd quite a night of it, I hear.'

‘I'm not with you, Sergeant.'

‘There was a gang of Blueshirts here, beating the shite out of you.'

‘Is that right?'

‘Was there a reason for that?'

‘Sure, why would they need a reason?' It was the kind of answer Billy Donnelly would have given at any other time, and at any other time he would have laughed. He smiled, but his voice spoke wariness and caution.

‘It was just you and Vincent Walsh, Billy?'

‘If you say so, Mr Gillespie. It's a long time ago.'

‘Vincent got away from them?'

Billy didn't reply. He'd picked up a glass and a towel earlier and had been drying the same glass for some time, unaware that he was doing it.

‘Did he?' insisted Stefan.

‘If I'd had the legs on me I'd have done the same.'

‘So when did he come back?'

The publican stopped drying the glass.

Stefan could see he was trying to work out an answer.

‘He was worried about you. That's what I'm told. He was on his way back here by two in the morning.'

‘I didn't see him.'

‘You didn't see him come in?'

‘He never came in. I didn't see him again.'