Kitabı oku: «The City of Shadows», sayfa 2
‘Give me the letters and we’ll be gone. That’s not so hard, is it?’
After a pause Vincent nodded. He straightened himself up. The Blueshirt smiled again. No, it wasn’t hard. He picked up the glass of whiskey he had put down so deliberately and drank it, slowly, in one go.
‘Amen!’
He turned back to Billy, still on the floor, clutching his stomach.
‘And we’ll have something for our trouble, Billy boy. Go on lads.’
The other three Blueshirts moved to the bar and started to take bottles of spirits from the shelves. They were going to clear them. The thin-faced man turned to Vincent again. He hadn’t seen Vincent’s hand tightening round the neck of a broken glass on the table beside him. Nobody had.
‘Where are they?’ demanded the man.
He didn’t see the bottle coming either, as Vincent summoned every ounce of fear and force and love in his body and pushed the splintered glass into the Blueshirt’s face. As the man cried out in pain, Vincent was already through the door that opened straight on to the stairs. The other Blueshirts, racing from behind the bar they were pillaging, were too late to stop the bolt on the inside of the staircase door shooting home. The older man was screaming now; he was momentarily blinded by the blood pouring down his face. The others wrenched at the door. It wouldn’t take long to break through it. It was just about as rotten and rickety as everything else in Carolan’s Bar.
Vincent Walsh was already at the top of the first flight of stairs. He didn’t stop. He carried on running up the narrow, twisting staircase that led to the top of the house. He pushed open the door to the tiny room that was his home. An iron-framed bed, a lopsided chest of drawers with a drawer missing, a hat stand with a few clothes, a wash basin and a jug, a paraffin stove, a pile of second-hand books. There was no lock on the door but he slammed it shut behind him and pushed the chest of drawers a few feet across the room against it. He turned to the bed and reached under the mattress. He pulled out a small bundle of letters, four blue envelopes.
He looked at the letters for a moment, unsure what to do, knowing he only had seconds to decide. He pushed them into his pocket. Then he climbed on to the bed. In the sloping roof above it was a small, square window. He pushed it open and pulled himself through, out on to the roof.
Thick cloud hung over the city and there was a steady drizzle now. The slates were wet underfoot; many of them were loose. But Carolan’s Bar was tucked tightly into the side of a more substantial Georgian building. As Vincent scrambled and slid down the roof, his fall was broken by the parapet wall next door. He climbed over it, into the lead valley on the other side. He had been here before. He had lain in that wide valley on hot summer nights sometimes, when his room was too stifling to let him sleep. He heard the angry, vengeful Blueshirts as they burst into the room above, but in the seconds before one of them appeared at the window, Vincent had run along the lead valley to the back of the Georgian house. He had disappeared.
*
It was raining heavily now. It had been for several hours. The city was silent. The day’s celebrations had gone on long into the night and they had faded away, finally, with a reluctance that wasn’t hard to understand. Tomorrow ordinary life would return. And the rain itself seemed to carry that message. Vincent Walsh was soaked to the skin. The cuts that covered his body had long since stopped bleeding and the bruises could have been worse. There were plenty of times they had been worse. But pain and fear didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had saved the letters. And in saving them he had saved the man he loved. Even if he never saw him again, even if the priest never knew about it, Vincent believed he had done something that made him worthy of the love he felt. This was the romantic notion that had grown in his head as he walked the streets of Dublin, pushing out the real world again, as it had been pushed out twenty-four hours before, walking along the Quays to the Park. Perhaps it was all his head could find to keep the truth out of his heart. He would have to leave Dublin, for a while at least, but he could come back when things had quietened down. There would always be a place to stay with Billy. He knew that. It didn’t matter. One day, one day he would meet the priest again. One day he would be able to tell him everything.
There was almost a spring in Vincent’s step as he turned the corner into the street that led through Smithfield Market to Red Cow Lane and Carolan’s. He was still wary, but it was four hours since he’d scrambled down the pub roof and made his escape. There’d be no one there now, except for the publican. He was sure they wouldn’t have hurt Billy; it was him they wanted. But he wasn’t as sure as he’d like to be. He walked more quickly. Then, as he stepped out across the echoing emptiness of Smithfield, he stopped. There was a car ahead. He recognised it immediately. Finally he knew that everything that had happened since he had set off to walk through the night to the Phoenix Park had been right. The faith he had found had been real. It was the priest’s car. He had come after all, after everything. Hadn’t there been the great procession in O’Connell Street that evening? A grand reception at the Mansion House? He had come when he could. Vincent didn’t move. He was smiling, smiling like an idiot. The car headlights blazed into his eyes. The engine started up. He was still smiling as he walked forward again. The car moved forward too, picking up speed. A puzzled frown was all that Vincent Walsh had time for as it came towards him, faster, louder. There wasn’t even time for fear before it hit him.
The rain was much heavier now. He could feel it on his face. The pain that had blasted through his whole body as the car smashed into him was there, somewhere, but it was a long way away. It was a pain in a dream that didn’t quite seem to belong to him. It was the rain on his cheek that he could feel most, running down to his lips, into his mouth. He didn’t know that his own tears were there too, mixing with the rain. He didn’t hear the car door open. He didn’t hear the footsteps coming towards him across the cobbles. His eyes opened for only a second, level with the pool of water his face was lying in. No moon shone through the heavy clouds, but inches from his eyes the water shimmered in the headlamps of the car. He registered the golden ripples spreading over that oily, muddy puddle. He felt he was struggling to wake from a deep sleep and couldn’t. All he could see was light, water and light. He didn’t even register the figure that was crouching down beside him now, cutting off that golden light. He would never register anything again.
2. Merrion Square
Dublin, December 1934
The woman was obviously preoccupied. As she stepped off the pavement to cross from Kildare Street to the Shelbourne Hotel a horn blasted at her. She stepped back abruptly. A taxi, turning in from Stephen’s Green at speed, swept past without slowing. A string of abusive words cannoned back at her in the broadest of Dublin accents. She smiled, pausing to catch her breath. Even those insults carried the flavour of a Dublin she had missed far more than she was ready to admit. She looked down Kildare Street and back to the Green. She crossed and walked on past the Shelbourne, her head up now, determination in her eyes. She was doing what she had to do. It wasn’t easy, but she wasn’t supposed to be afraid of things that weren’t easy. She wasn’t supposed to be afraid of anything. She stopped for a moment, by the entrance to the hotel, looking up. A man was leaning out of an upstairs window, where a flagpole carrying the Irish tricolour, green, white and orange, extended over the pavement. There was a second pole beside it and the man was unfurling another flag. She knew the colours even before it dropped down beside the tricolour; red, white and black, and at the centre the swastika. She glanced round, expecting other people to be surprised, but no one else had noticed. She walked on quickly. She had other things to do.
The woman was in her early twenties. She was tall. Her hair was almost black, flecked in places with red. There was a warmth about her dark skin that could almost be felt, as if it had known a fiercer sun than ever shone in Ireland, even on the best of summer days. It was a sun that certainly didn’t shine on grey and soft December days like this one.
The purpose in her step was firm and unwavering as she walked along Merrion Row. She moved to avoid a crowd of winter-pale faces, bursting noisily out from a pub. She caught the breath of beer. It was another memory, almost comforting, but she wasn’t here for comfort. She turned into Upper Merrion Street. It was quieter. The flat fronts of Georgian houses gave way to the pillared buildings of government at Leinster House. She saw the trees that marked out Merrion Square. What preoccupied her was the tall terraced house at number twenty-five, with the closed shutters and the green paint peeling from the door, and the big room at the end of the long unlit corridor where the man who smiled too much did his work. Briefly her pace slowed, but only briefly. There was no real fear in her about what she had to do. The fear was about the darkness that might lie on the other side of it.
‘She’s back, your dark-eyed acushla.’
It was the fat policeman who spoke, squeezed uncomfortably into the driver’s seat of a black Austin 10, exhaling smoke from a Sweet Afton, the last of a packet of ten he had bought just before he’d parked the car two hours earlier. They were several hundred yards along from twenty-five Merrion Square. Detective Sergeant Stefan Gillespie, sitting in the passenger seat, opened his eyes. He wasn’t tired, but closing his eyes and feigning sleep was one way to stop Dessie MacMahon talking to him. He had already taken an hour of Dessie’s problems with his innumerable in-laws; gougers and gurriers the lot of them, and all the worse in drink, which they were in a lot it seemed. But Detective Garda MacMahon was right. It was the same woman. They had watched her make the same journey yesterday. They had watched her pass the house at twenty-five Merrion Square twice before she made herself mount the steps and knock on Doctor Hugo Keller’s door. They had watched her go inside, watched her emerge fifteen minutes later, and watched her hurry away again. They knew why she was back now.
‘She was making the appointment yesterday. This’ll be it I’d say.’
Dessie drew on his last cigarette one more time. Stefan nodded, his eyes fixed on the woman. She wasn’t what he’d expected. Even yesterday she didn’t seem to fit. That was the only way he could put it. There had been nervousness and uncertainty then. That made sense. Now she had her head high. It was more than grim determination though. It was in the way she held herself. As she paused for an instant at the bottom of the steps, she tossed her hair back, sweeping it off her face. There was nothing there that said shame. He could almost feel anger in that determination. There was something more too, something like pride. They were all words that didn’t belong here, words she couldn’t have any right to, doing what she was doing. And suddenly he found himself conscious of her as a woman, elegant, tense, beautiful. He hadn’t really noticed it yesterday. He frowned. It was a squalid business and that was the end of it. He didn’t like the intrusion of feelings that challenged that simple fact. The woman went inside the house and the green door closed behind her. The smell of sweat and smoke that came from Dessie swept over Stefan Gillespie again. There was a job to do and they needed to get on with it. As he turned, Dessie was grinning.
‘Your woman’s a looker. You wouldn’t blame the feller who wanted to give her a go.’
It would have been an exaggeration to say that the fat policeman had read his sergeant’s mind. It wasn’t even close. But it was still a lot closer than Stefan was comfortable with.
‘We’ll give it a few minutes, Dessie.’
‘I need a piss first.’ Garda MacMahon opened the car door and squeezed out, dropping his cigarette end in the gutter with the other nine. He walked quickly through a gate into the square, in search of a concealing tree. Sergeant Gillespie got out of the car himself and took a welcome breath of air. He was taller than his colleague and thinner, quite a lot thinner, and where Dessie was balding he had a mop of thick, brown hair that was shapeless rather than long, as if he didn’t remember to get it cut very often, which he didn’t. He looked younger than his twenty-eight years and people often assumed he was the garda rather than the sergeant. He put on his hat. It was colder than he’d thought. He stood looking towards the house. The dark-skinned woman was making him uneasy. It wasn’t a job he’d feel good about at the best of times, but it was more than that. He felt like getting back into the Austin and driving away. He pushed the thought from his mind. At least he wouldn’t have to sit there all afternoon with Dessie and his family rows and the smoke from another packet of Sweet Afton. Detective Garda MacMahon came back from the square, still buttoning up his fly.
The two policemen walked to the house. Stefan mounted the steps and rapped on the door. After a moment, he knocked again. It opened a crack. A middle-aged woman in spotless nurse’s uniform looked out at him.
‘Yes?’ It was supposed to be a question, but as yesses go it meant something much more like ‘no’.
‘We’d like to speak to Mr Keller.’ He took off his hat.
‘He’s not in just now.’
‘We can wait.’
‘He’s not here. And he sees no one without an appointment.’
‘Then I’d like to make an appointment. Now would be fine.’
Detective Sergeant Gillespie took his warrant card from his pocket and held it up. The woman’s first instinct was to slam the door in his face, but Dessie MacMahon had anticipated her. With surprising speed for his size he moved forward, past his sergeant, and put a foot and a portion of his not inconsiderable torso against the fast-closing door. He applied his weight in the opposite direction to the nurse, pushing her and the door firmly back into the hall. He had slammed her against the wall quite hard, but even as the two policemen walked into the house she had recovered her breath sufficiently for her furious and now panicking voice to fill the echoing hallway.
‘Hugo! Doctor Keller!’
‘You think he might be back then?’ said Dessie, grinning.
A door at the far end of the long hall opened. A small, rather avuncular man stood with the light behind him, peering through the thick lenses of his glasses as if he couldn’t really make out who was there. But if there was concern beneath that puzzled look it was well hidden. There was already a half smile on his face, even as Detective Sergeant Gillespie started to walk towards him. He knew what the two men were. He had absorbed that information and accepted it. He was not a man who bothered about the inevitable. He didn’t move as the detective approached him; instead his smile broadened. Stefan had only seen Keller at a distance before, going in and out of the house. He was always well dressed; today was no exception. Even though he was in shirtsleeves, the shirt was gleaming white; the yellow bow tie was perfectly tied; the braces had a floral pattern that was bright, almost loud, yet expensively tasteful; the suit trousers had knife-sharp creases; and his black shoes were spotlessly clean. By now Keller’s benign smile was irritating the detective. It was altogether too pleasant to be anything other than extremely unpleasant. Wherever it came from the effect was to make him want to wipe the smile off the man’s face with his fist. But even as that thought flashed through his mind he had an unsettling picture of Keller getting up from the floor and wiping the blood from his mouth, with the smile still there, broader and more unctuous than ever.
‘Hugo Keller,’ said Stefan flatly.
‘Doctor Keller.’ The German accent was stronger than he had expected. But he knew German accents. Austria, probably Vienna.
‘It’s Mr Keller I think.’
‘My doctorate is from the University of Graz. You may not know it, but it’s the second oldest university in Austria. Doctor Keller is correct.’
‘In Wien hat jeder streunende Hund ein Doktorat, aber sie sind noch immer Hunde, nicht Ärzte, Herr Keller.’ He stressed ‘Herr’. It was true. In Vienna every dog in the streets had a doctorate in something. They were still dogs, not doctors. The smile wavered on Keller’s lips. This wasn’t quite the Dublin detective he had anticipated. Contempt might not be so wise.
‘I am Detective Sergeant Gillespie. I will be conducting a search of your premises. I believe you have instruments here that have been used to procure miscarriages, contrary to Section 58 of the Offences against the Persons Act, and I believe you are, even now, engaged in procuring a miscarriage for a woman. You will be taken into custody, Mr Keller.’
‘Naturally, Sergeant. I’ll get my jacket.’
He turned back into the room. Stefan followed. He passed an open door on his right, a small office full of books and files. He paused, looking in, registering it. The nurse had composed herself now. She brushed back her hair and walked past him into the office. Unlike her employer the look on her face was familiar; it was fear. He watched her as she sat at the desk.
‘Please don’t try to leave,’ he said quietly.
‘Why should I?’ Despite the fear, this was her territory.
He carried on into the back drawing room of the house. It was a startling change after the dark corridor, with its stained wallpaper and blackened ceiling. The room was bright and clean and looked as if it had been transported there directly from an expensive private clinic. But while Stefan took this in his attention was fixed on the dark-haired woman he had watched enter the house. She stood in the window, framed by the sunlight that had momentarily broken through the grey December clouds. It shone through her hair in a gauze-like haze. For a second the startling brightness made him blink. And then it was gone. She was looking straight at him. Now, more closely, he saw there was indeed neither fear nor shame in her dark eyes. There was anger, and it seemed to be directed at him.
‘If you’d wait in the hall, Mr Keller.’ He didn’t look round.
‘I’m sorry, my dear.’ Keller smiled a slightly different smile at the woman. It was kinder and more reassuring than the one he had for Garda sergeants. He picked up his jacket from the back of a chair and pulled it on. ‘I don’t know if you heard any of that, outside in the hall. This gentleman is a policeman, a detective. My advice would be to say nothing, but that’s entirely up to you of course. You need offer no explanation for why you are in this room, as he well knows.’ He walked to the door. There was a mirror on the wall and he stopped to straighten his bow tie. Stefan Gillespie hardly noticed him go out. His eyes were still on the woman at the window.
‘Can you tell me who you are, Miss?’
She shook her head, but only in irritable and frustrated disbelief.
‘You couldn’t have done this on another day, could you?’
He just looked. Nothing at all about this woman was right.
‘How long has this man been doing this, procuring miscarriages, whatever it is you call it? How many years? It’s just what I needed, you and your great policeman’s boots stomping in before I’d even got started!’
‘I need your name. I’m sure you know why I’m here.’
The woman gazed at him and shook her head again. All at once the anger was gone. He saw something else in her eyes now. It was a mixture of contempt and suspicion. She looked at him as if he was the one in the wrong.
‘No, I don’t know why you’re here. I think I’ll reserve my judgement on that, Sergeant. In the meantime I shall take Mr Keller’s advice about keeping my mouth shut. You may be his best friend. So I shall say nothing.’
*
Pearse Street Garda station was the main police station for the South City, built for the old Dublin Metropolitan Police in 1915, the year before Padraig Pearse was executed after the Easter Rising, when the road was still Great Brunswick Street. It took up the corner of Townsend Street, looking towards Trinity College, a grey, austere building that echoed the Scottish-castle style of architecture popular with insurance companies, all chiselled stone and mullioned windows. The DMP was only a memory now, except for two small corbels supporting the arch over the main entrance; the sour faces of a DMP officer and a helmeted constable still looked down in disapproval. As stations went it wasn’t a bad place to work. The offices upstairs were brighter and cleaner than most of Dublin’s Garda stations, but downstairs the cells smelt like they always smelt – of stale sweat and urine and tobacco.
Stefan Gillespie sat in a room on the ground floor, close enough to the stairs for the odour of the cells to hover in the air. A bare table separated him from the dark-haired woman. The room was bare too, lit by a naked bulb. There was a window high in one wall, no more than a foot square, the glass painted over with the remains of what once must have been whitewash. She had still given him no information and no explanation. She denied nothing, admitted nothing, said nothing. He didn’t even know her name. She returned his gaze with quiet self-assurance. He was the one who kept looking away to scribble something he didn’t need to scribble on the sheet of white paper in front of him. She was beginning to make him feel she was the one running this.
‘You’re from Dublin, thereabouts anyway. The leafier parts I’d say.’
She didn’t answer.
‘You’ve clearly been out of the country though.’
‘An accent and a suntan, I can see you’re nobody’s fool.’
She didn’t need to smile to make him feel foolish.
‘Do you realise how much trouble you’re in?’
‘As a matter of fact I don’t.’
‘I can see you’re an intelligent woman. You’re not what I expected.’
He knew those last words were another mistake.
‘You were expecting some sort of idiot, were you?’
‘That’s not what I meant. ’
‘Idiot enough to be pregnant. Well, how idiotic can a woman get?’
‘Sooner or later you’re going to tell me who you are. You know that as well as I do. The only thing that can help you in this situation is to cooperate with us as fully as possible. It’s Mr Keller we want, not you.’
‘I’m sure even he knows you’ve got him. What do you need me for?’
She reached across to the packet of cigarettes on the table. They were Stefan’s. She hesitated, looking at him. He shrugged. She took one and put it between her lips. He pulled the lighter out from his pocket and flicked it, then stretched over and lit the cigarette with what he hoped was an appropriately reassuring smile. But if he thought the woman’s silence was about to end with this small act of human contact he was mistaken.
‘Thank you.’
She drew on the cigarette, then shook her head.
‘I can’t do what I went there to do. And that’s your fault. I’m not sure where that leaves me. Well, apart from being stuck here in a police station with you. That’s all I’ve got suddenly. I want to see what happens next.’
‘What happens? This is about a life, a life that would have ended this afternoon. It’s about God knows how many other lives that have ended in that back room.’ He was speaking the words he was supposed to speak now, but he knew they didn’t sound like his own. He knew too that this clever, unfathomable woman would understand that immediately. And she did.
‘Yes, it is about a life. I know that already. I wish I didn’t.’
Stefan saw something else in the woman’s face now. It was sadness, a deep and uncertain sadness. He also saw that it had nothing at all to do with why they were here. Whatever she was talking about it wasn’t the conversation he had just felt obliged to start. The interview was still going nowhere. He was not controlling this. She was. The words ‘stuck-up bitch’ were in his head. He’d had enough. He got up, pushing the cigarettes at her.
‘I’ll leave you the fags. It’ll be a long night.’ He went. Let her stew.
As he left the room he found himself smiling unexpectedly. He remembered another time he had walked away from a conversation with a woman and thought the same thing – ‘stuck-up bitch’. It was nearly six years ago. A pub in Nassau Street. Maeve. Seven months later he’d married her. And now she had been dead for nearly two years. One year, nine months, eight days. He had thought about that night in Nassau Street a thousand times in those months, waking and sleeping. He had relived it as he had relived every moment of their lives together. But he had never smiled about it in quite the same way before. It wasn’t that the woman from Merrion Square reminded him of Maeve. Perhaps she reminded him of something about himself he had forgotten. Instead of feeling angry she made him want to laugh. These thoughts came at him out of nowhere. He pushed them away. He saw Dessie MacMahon walking towards him, with a bacon sandwich and a mug of tea.
‘Has Keller phoned his solicitor?’ he asked.
Dessie nodded, taking a bite of the sandwich.
‘But he’s still not saying anything?’
‘No. He’s very polite about it though.’
‘Is the solicitor on his way?’
‘He didn’t say.’
‘Stick him in a cell for the night and see how polite he is about that.’
Garda MacMahon took another bite of the sandwich.
‘What about the nurse?’ said Stefan.
‘She’s still giving out, but it’s the same story. Nothing to say.’
‘The evidence is all in Merrion Square. I don’t understand how Keller thinks he can explain that away by keeping his mouth shut and grinning.’
‘Do we give him another go, Sarge?’
‘No, I’ve had enough. Just lock the three of them up for the night.’
He wasn’t sure that would wipe away Hugo Keller’s smile. It looked like it was painted on. He was too cocky. He seemed to think he was untouchable. The nurse would keep insisting that she was just a nurse. He didn’t believe her, but Sheila Hogan was hard. She wouldn’t talk till there was something in it for her. The dark-haired woman was different. She had no place in this. Twelve hours in a police cell might bring her to her senses.
It was dark in Merrion Square as Detective Sergeant Gillespie approached the house again, but it looked brighter now than it had in daylight. The shutters were open and all the lights were on. The front door was open too and a uniformed guard stood on the steps. Stefan smiled a greeting.
‘How’s it going, Liam?’
‘Great, I can never get enough of standing around in the fecking cold.’
Stefan went in and moved down the hall to the back drawing room. A man in his late fifties was sitting on the edge of the couch, writing notes. Edward Wayland-Smith was the State Pathologist. He was tall, overweight, bearded, dressed in tweeds that made him look like he had just been blasting pheasants with a shotgun or pulling fish from a stream with a rod and flies. There was a silver-fresh salmon in the boot of his car to say he had been.
‘He’s certainly got some extraordinary equipment here. You wouldn’t find better in any hospital in Ireland. Well, in most hospitals you’d be grateful to find anything at all.’ He continued to write as he spoke, not looking up. ‘Nota bene!’ he announced, finally raising his eyes.
‘Suspended from the ceiling a 170 centimetre shadowless operating lamp. You also see a state-of-the-art gynaecological chair; German, almost brand new I’d say, with some very clever modifications. There’s a well-equipped workshop in the cellar too. It looks like your man Keller was making his own equipment, or at least improving on what he’d got. Ingenious, some of it. He must be rather bright, certainly not your average backstreet abortionist. There’s also an X-ray transformer of very high quality. I haven’t seen one like it in Ireland. It’s a modification of another continental piece of apparatus. I’ve made a full inventory, which I will have typed up tomorrow. You have looked at the office I assume, Sergeant?’
Stefan nodded. ‘I’d like you to make a note of the books.’
‘It’s done.’ Wayland-Smith got up and walked out to the hall, turning back the pages of his notebook as he did. He went into the office. He stood beside a bookcase, scanning his notes, then pointing at some of the books.
‘They are mostly standard medical texts, nothing out of the ordinary.’
‘Except that Mr Keller was a quack posing as a doctor.’
‘Well, I’ve encountered no shortage of highly qualified colleagues I’d describe as quacks posing as doctors. It’s unfortunate that there seems to be no law against that. In several books you’ll see sections on abortion and miscarriage have been marked and quite heavily annotated. I’ve recorded those. There are also a number of books dealing very explicitly with sex, in ways that might shock even a policeman, some in German that would not be readily available on our island of saints and scholars, and would normally be sent back whence they came with much sprinkling of holy water. It seems clear Mr Keller was handling a lot of what the profession likes to refer to, in a hushed whisper, as “women’s complaints”. Again it’s not your run-of-the-mill abortionist. He certainly had no problems writing prescriptions that were acceptable in any chemist in Dublin. A Merrion Square address never fails to impress. There are very detailed financial records, almost proof in itself that the man is not a real doctor. Never any names though. All very discreet. And all very expensive from the look of it. He was certainly earning more than I do. Oh, and there’s a revolver too. German, I think’
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