The City of Shadows

The telephone rang. He reached across the desk and picked it up. The voice at the other end was an odd combination of the punctilious and lazy.

‘Is this the CID office? I’m afraid my front of house manager took the number, but not the name. His best suggestion was that I ask for the fat detective who smokes Sweet Afton. I don’t know how many fat detectives you have, and perhaps they all smoke Sweet Afton; however it may give you a clue and, given your line of work, that should be more than enough.’

‘Is that the Gate?’

‘Faultless! You see, I didn’t underestimate you.’

‘I’m the thin one who doesn’t smoke Sweet Afton.’

‘It’s about the first-night ticket. We have a name for you.’

Crossing over the Liffey and on to O’Connell Street Stefan Gillespie looked at the Christmas window full of toys at Clery’s. Tom’s tricycle was there. He had paid the deposit at the beginning of November and a little more at the start of December. When his wages came next week he would be able to find the rest. It was a long walk to the far end of the wide street, past the statue of O’Connell the Liberator, past the GPO, past Parnell and the incongruous Nelson’s Column. The other Christmas windows went unnoticed. His mind was full of things that didn’t connect with each other. He hoped the Gate Theatre would at least show him a way forward for the body on the hillside at Kilmashogue.

The theatre made up one side of the Rotunda Hospital, where its grey eighteenth-century facade turned sharply into Parnell Square. A small door, almost unnoticeable until you reached it and fell up the steps, led into a dark and narrow corridor, more like the entrance to a Georgian town house that had seen better days, as most of the houses in this part of Dublin had, than to a theatre whose reputation was not measured by its size but by the grace and the compassion it brought to its cramped and untidy quarters. When you walked into that corridor and up the steep steps, to an auditorium that seated barely three hundred people, you had done more than enter a theatre. If there was anywhere in Dublin where the writ of the city’s squinting windows didn’t run, it was here. The Gate was an island. Its founder, Micheal Mac Liammoir, an actor who gave his life’s greatest performance as an Englishman triumphantly playing an Irishman, had made the play the theatre’s only purpose and in doing had created something more than a theatre. The Gate had ignored Dublin and had made Dublin, a city that was nothing if not contrary, love it for that. Along the way, almost unnoticed, it had given lungs to a city that, despite all its passions and its furious energies, was wheezing and consumptive and in constant need of God’s clean air.

Detective Sergeant Gillespie sat in the Green Room, high-ceilinged, and small like everything else; the walls were dark, green as they had to be, lined with photographs of actors and productions. Light poured in from a high Georgian window on to the street below. When the door opened he knew the man who came in. He had sat in the auditorium here with Maeve; it seemed like a long time ago now. Was it five years? Diarmuid and Grainne; love and death. Micheal Mac Liammoir had been Diarmuid. The actor shook Stefan’s hand firmly, fixing his gaze hard for some seconds. It was a look that told Stefan he would be judged here, and precisely what he would be told would depend on that judgement. It was as obvious as that.

‘Your colleague said very little. I didn’t speak to him myself. But I imagine this is something rather serious. I think you should tell me more.’

It was an odd start to the questions Stefan was there to ask, but he sensed this was a place where he would find honesty and trust reciprocated.

‘We have the body of an unidentified man. We don’t know the circumstances of his death, but they are, for the moment, suspicious. I can’t say any more than that. The fragment of a theatre ticket was found in a wallet buried with the man. So far it’s the only thing that’s given us any chance of identifying him. For now we’re assuming the ticket was his.’

Mac Liammoir didn’t waste time showing surprise or shock.

‘Well, we’ve dug out a list of people who were invited to the first night of The Way of the World. The ticket in question was given to a young man called Vincent Walsh. I didn’t know him well myself but he did work here as a dresser from time to time. He was never on our permanent staff.’

‘Was the ticket used?’

‘No. There’s always someone ticking off the names of guests at a first night and Vincent Walsh’s name wasn’t ticked. I presume he didn’t come.’

‘Would you have expected him to?’

‘He was very close to our wardrobe master, Eric Purcell. He was his guest.’ He pronounced all his words with an unusual, almost mannered care. He spoke the words ‘very close’ quite slowly, watching Stefan’s eyes again. It was not a statement but a question. ‘Do you understand?’ He did. He also understood that the best answer to the question was to say nothing. Mac Liammoir would decide if that answer was the one he wanted to hear.

‘I have spoken to Eric. He can remember the evening very clearly. He was expecting Mr Walsh and he was rather upset when he didn’t arrive. As it transpires he didn’t see his friend again. No one did. He simply disappeared. Of course, that makes some sense now. You will want to talk to Mr Purcell.’

Stefan nodded. Mac Liammoir left the Green Room for a moment and returned quickly with a man of around forty. He looked nervous and as they were left alone, the nervousness seemed closer to fear. Stefan recognised the species of fear precisely. Eric Purcell was a small man whose effeminate features and movements were a part of his being; he would have encountered policemen in very different circumstances, without the protection of the Gate’s walls. He would have had reason to be nervous.

It was obvious that Purcell was upset; it was obvious that Vincent Walsh had mattered to him, in a way that already told Stefan the world the dead man had inhabited. And because of that it wasn’t surprising that the wardrobe master knew very little about the dead man’s family. He knew Vincent had had a mother and father in Carlow, and that’s where he’d grown up. They had a shop there; Purcell thought it was a tobacconist’s. That was all. As far as he knew, Vincent Walsh hadn’t kept in touch with his parents.

‘I thought something was wrong, Sergeant.’

‘You expected him to be at the first night?’

‘He’d never have missed it. It wasn’t just the play. I got him a little bit of work here when I could. I’d told him there was something in the offing.’

‘Did you try to contact him?’

‘I did. But he’d gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘People go, don’t they?’

‘Who told you he’d gone?’

‘He worked at Billy Donnelly’s, Carolan’s, in Red Cow Lane. He’d a room there. It was Billy who said he’d left. Well, why wouldn’t he? There isn’t much to stay for.’ It was clear Vincent Walsh’s disappearance had left a bitter taste. It was all the more bitter now that Eric Purcell knew the anger and hurt he had harboured for so long afterwards had been unjustified.

‘What made you think something was wrong?’

‘I don’t know. I just thought Vincent was better than that.’

‘When did you last see him?’

There were tears in the wardrobe master’s eyes, of grief and guilt. He hesitated. Stefan could see there were things Purcell didn’t want to say. He had been gentle enough with him at first. Now he needed to be tougher.

‘Mr Purcell, your friend didn’t meet a happy end. He was killed. And when he was dead someone took him out to a mountainside, dug a hole and dumped his body in it. I want to find out who did that. I need your help.’

‘I’ll help if I can.’

‘You remember the date?’

‘Yes.’ He had made his decision; to stop feeling sorry for himself.

‘I couldn’t tell you the date off the top of my head, but it’s easy to remember the day. It was the night after the Eucharistic Mass in the Park. He pulled me out of bed, hammering on my door at one o’clock in the morning.’

‘Did he often do that?’

Eric Purcell shook his head. It still wasn’t easy. He was fighting the old habits of self-preservation that told him never to say anything to the Guards, about anything, about anybody. Stefan knew that and he waited.

‘He’d been at the Mass in the afternoon, then he’d been working in Carolan’s. When the pub closed some