fellers came in, Blueshirts, a gang of them. They started roughing up Vincent and Billy the way the Guards — I’m not saying — I mean it happens sometimes, you’d know yourself, Sergeant.’
Purcell assumed Stefan wouldn’t think there was anything out of the ordinary about a couple of queers being beaten up. It wasn’t as if it was entirely unreasonable. Didn’t the police have a go at it now and then too?
‘So what happened?’
‘He got away, and eventually he turned up at my flat.’
‘Was he hurt?’
‘There was a bit of blood, a few bruises.’
‘Did he stay?’
‘He left after a couple of hours. He was worried about Billy.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Your friend gets you up in the middle of the night. There’s blood on his face. He’s been beaten up. He stays a bit, then he goes back to the pub where he was attacked. You’re worried about him. But you’ve arranged to meet him here the next week. Then he doesn’t turn up. He’s just gone. You never see him again. And you don’t remember what he talked about?’
‘He didn’t say very much. That’s the truth. He didn’t want to talk.’
‘So what did he do?’ persisted Stefan.
‘Nothing really. I cleaned him up. I washed the blood — ’
‘Did he know these men, the Blueshirts?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘So did you just sit there and look at each other?’
‘He wrote a letter.’
Stefan looked at him, surprised.
‘He wanted an envelope. He had some papers in his pocket. I didn’t really see. He put them in the envelope with a note. Then he wanted a stamp, but I didn’t have one there. He asked me to post the letter the next day.’
‘Did you?’
The wardrobe master nodded.
‘Did you look at the address?’
‘It was addressed to Billy Donnelly.’
‘Which was where he was going when he left?’
Purcell nodded again.
‘Didn’t that strike you as odd?’
‘It wasn’t my business.’ Grief was still there; so were old jealousies.
‘Did he say anything about this letter?’
‘No. He seemed a bit happier when he’d written it though. He laughed when he gave it to me. He said they wouldn’t look in the same place twice.’
‘Did you know what he meant?’
‘No, I told you, he didn’t want to talk about what happened.’
Stefan Gillespie believed him. He believed him all the more because of the note of bitterness he could hear, even though tears were still in Eric Purcell’s eyes. Vincent Walsh had mattered to him, perhaps more than he had mattered to Vincent. When Vincent was in trouble he’d knocked on the wardrobe master’s door; he needed help, but he didn’t offer trust in return.
‘What’s going to happen to him? I mean his body.’
‘We’ll contact his parents now. He’ll be buried in due course.’
‘I’d like to know when.’
‘I’m sure Mr and Mrs Walsh — ’
‘I doubt they’ll be inviting his friends, Sergeant.’
Walking down the stairs on his way out of the Gate, Stefan was surprised to see Wayland-Smith sprawling in an armchair by the box office, frowning over the crossword in
‘My car’s outside. It seemed quickest to come here and get you.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘They’ve found another body at Kilmashogue.’
It was almost dark as Stefan Gillespie and Wayland-Smith stood on the road below the woody mountainside again. The rain had gone now. It was a clear, crisp December night. Below them the great sprawl of Dublin was just starting to disappear into the darkness. The lights from the tractor and the State Pathologist’s estate shone on the heap of earth and rock that still slewed across the track. It was only when the workmen had started to clear the landslip that they discovered the second body. It lay in several pieces where it had broken apart as it tumbled down the slope with the soil that had covered it; a leg, an arm, the torso and head. Black skin still held some of the bones in place, barely, like a wet paper bag about to split apart; other bones had already lost most of their flesh. It was immediately clear, to Stefan as well as to Wayland-Smith, that the body had been buried far more recently than the first. The jaw and the face were already almost a skull, but on the top of the head there was still skin and hair. It was long hair, a woman’s. The pathologist turned to a guard behind him, who held a small cardboard box.
‘So show me.’
The policeman moved forward, stepping up on to the mound of earth, opening the flaps of the box. Stefan needed to shine a torch in to see. It could have been no more than earth and leaves, muddy, compressed; it could have been the carcass of a young rabbit, the fur stripped away, rotting. But the tiny skull was human. It was a foetus. Wayland-Smith crossed himself. It was a gesture Stefan didn’t expect; he was conscious that he had never seen the State Pathologist make it over any adult corpse before. He moved closer to the torso and the head of the woman, stumbling in the slippery mud. He bent down, shining the torch on to her skull. He brushed away the mud on the forehead. There was something, quite small, blacker than the blackened skin; it was a round hole. Wayland- Smith squatted down beside him.
‘She’s been dead no more than a year, maybe less.’
He took the torch from Stefan and bent nearer the head. The work of the soil had nearly removed the smell of putrefaction from the dead flesh, but this close it lingered. Stefan coughed as it hit the back of his throat. Wayland- Smith took a pencil from his pocket. He poked it into the hole.
‘I’d say so too, Sergeant. It’s our captive bolt pistol.’
In the light from the torch something glinted in the mud. It was tiny. Stefan brushed it with his finger. It glinted more. He eased it away from the wet earth. A thin black cord came with it, circling the vertebrae that were all that was left of the neck; a silver chain. What had glimmered in the torchlight was silver too, barely half an inch in size. It was a Star of David.
Detective Sergeant Gillespie sat in the Austin outside the house in Lennox Street. It smelt, as always, of Dessie MacMahon’s Sweet Afton. Usually that irritated him, if he bothered to notice it, but for now it seemed to drive out the smell of rain and soil and death that he had been breathing for the last twenty-four hours. Inside, Hannah Rosen was telling Susan Field’s father that his daughter’s body had been found. Stefan had not been on the wet plot of earth at Kilmashogue very long before he knew. It was scarcely an hour later that her handbag had been found, still full of the ordinary business of her life; comb, lipstick, pens and powder compact. There was a purse packed with shillings and pennies and threepenny bits and bus tickets, and there was a cheque book from the College Green branch of the Hibernian bank. The name inside the cheque book — still clearly legible — was Susan Field’s.
Hannah had not been surprised by the fact that her friend was dead of course. Instinct had already told her that. But the circumstances threw her back into the kind of bewildered disbelief that made acceptance hard. Faced with death, knowing is never enough, not at first. She had known but she didn’t believe. And now her heart, for a short time at least, had to fight the truth, in the futile, painful battle that can only be lost. Stefan could see it in her face; he had fought that battle once himself. He hadn’t told her everything. There was still too much he didn’t understand. Now there was more. How did the murder of Susan Field relate to the death of Vincent Walsh, dumped
