selling information? It was never a recipe for a quiet old age. He could get away with a lot here — ’
‘He didn’t want to go to Danzig. It was because of the priest — ’
‘It doesn’t much matter now, does it?’
‘All he wanted was to come back here. He wanted to stop. That’s why he bought this place. But they wouldn’t let go. They wouldn’t let him stop. He didn’t want to leave Ireland in the first place. If you hadn’t — ’
‘The man’s dead, let’s leave it there. I’m not here for the wake.’
‘Then what are you here for, Mr Gillespie?’
‘The notebook.’
‘Jesus, are you still on about that?’
‘We found the woman.’
‘Who?’
‘Susan Field. You don’t remember?’
‘I remember I wasn’t there when she came to Merrion Square.’
‘But he’d have told you she died.’
She said nothing for several seconds, then nodded.
‘Someone shot her. Did you know that, Sheila?’
‘No. Hugo didn’t know either,’ she said, clearly surprised.
‘No, I don’t think he did. But I’m not really bothered about what he knew now. What matters is who he knew. It was a Special Branch man shot her, Detective Sergeant Jimmy Lynch. You know who he is, don’t you?’
‘I should do. He put me in hospital.’
‘And is that why you’re up here as Mrs Donahue?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know. Wasn’t Jimmy working for Keller?’
‘He was working for himself.’
‘And when Hugo went, he wanted the book — for himself.’
She said nothing again. The habit of silence was an old one.
‘So what’s in this book, Sheila?’
‘Nothing that matters now.’
‘Why not?’
‘It was his insurance policy. That’s what he called it. If anything went wrong. He put everything down in it. What he knew, what he sold, what he kept for himself. It was what he kept for himself that mattered most. He said it was his ticket to stay in Ireland. There were so many people he knew about, important people. He’d had enough. He just wanted to come up here and forget it all. When he went back to Germany he didn’t know they’d force him to keep working for them. It was only to lie low, till he came home again.’
‘You make blackmail sound like the Vincent de Paul, Sheila. It would have been a little nest egg too, to dip into when the winters were hard.’
‘You’re probably right. Maybe he’d never really have stopped.’
‘Is it here then?’
She didn’t respond.
‘It’s no use to you now.’
‘And what use is it to you?’
‘I don’t know yet, but if it’s not me isn’t it Jimmy, sooner or later?’
‘People are stupid, you know that?’ She spoke the words bitterly. ‘They do stupid things. They steal and lie and cheat and fuck. That’s all they do. That’s all they are. Why shouldn’t someone get something out of it? If it hadn’t been him it would have been someone else. Didn’t they deserve it anyway, most of them? He always said when he got to the pearly gates they wouldn’t let him in, but he’d find a way. He’d just keep his eyes open and sooner or later he’d have something on God himself!’ She shook her head and looked up at the mountains again. There were no tears.
‘You’ve kept it for him long enough. He’s not coming for it now.’
He couldn’t pretend to feel much for Hugo Keller, but he understood what loss was; and somewhere in those last words Sheila Hogan sensed that. She touched the final letter she had written to Hugo Keller, a letter he had never read. Stefan Gillespie had brought with him the last breath of the man she loved, and she was oddly grateful that he had. She had waited. She had believed, as Keller had believed, that he would come back here and find her. And now he wouldn’t. She got up and walked to the vegetable garden. There was a spade sticking into a bed where she had been earthing up potatoes. She pulled it out and went across to an apple tree by the stone wall. It was full of white blossom. She pushed the spade hard into the ground and started to dig.
He stopped at the ford across the Avonbeg and sat by the river. He opened the Jacob’s biscuit tin Sheila Hogan had dug up under the apple tree; there was a picture of a goldfinch feeding on yellow gorse flowers. It was a small, dark green notebook. The handwriting was tiny and meticulous. It filled every lined page though it took no notice of the lines. At first he thought it was in some kind of code but it was no more than a truncated shorthand of abbreviations and numbers. The abbreviations were names, sometimes addresses. The numbers were dates, sometimes sums of money. Sometimes there was a page of notes following a name, but they were written in the same shorthand, missing out vowels, often stopping a word half way through. Sometimes there were lists of dozens of names on a page, with no more than an address and a series of letters after them that classified them in some way. Keller’s shorthand was German of course. It had an elliptical quality that would make it tedious to decipher, but it wouldn’t be so hard.
At the back of the book, in a small cardboard wallet, there were several pieces of folded paper. The first was a letter. He knew the woman’s name Hugo Keller had written at the top, even in its shortened form, and the name underneath it. She was the wife of a government minister and he was a senior diplomat. There was little more than the address of a hotel in London, but there didn’t need to be any more. The next sheet of paper was a list of names. There were politicians, businessmen, senior clerics, several senior Garda officers. There was no explanation but at the end of the list was the name Becky Cooper and the sum of money Keller had paid her. Stefan knew her name well enough; she ran a brothel in Dublin. By two of the names there were abbreviations and dates. The word ‘Syph.’ wasn’t hard to expand on. Keller had treated two of the men on Becky’s list for syphilis. Next there were four letters folded together. ‘My Dearest Vincent.’ He had found them.
They weren’t long, but they were filled with vivid, almost unstoppable sexual desire, interspersed with strangely banal details about work. The third letter ended with an expression of growing excitement about the upcoming Eucharistic Congress. ‘Only a month away and there is so much to do! It’s wonderful! Your Loving Friend, Robert.’ There had been little to connect the two bodies on the mountainside at Kilmashogue. There was the earth in which their bones were buried. There was the single hole from a captive bolt pistol in each of their skulls. And there was Detective Sergeant Jimmy Lynch, who sold these letters to Hugo Keller and drove the car that collected Susan Field from Keller’s clinic. That made Lynch the only link between Vincent Walsh and Susan Field. Now there was something else. Monsignor Robert Fitzpatrick had been Vincent’s lover. He was also the man who had sent Jimmy Lynch to twenty-five Merrion Square to take Susan Field away. Fitzpatrick was someone else the Special Branch sergeant worked for. That day in Earlsfort Terrace, when Stefan had questioned the monsignor, the priest had shown only bitterness and resentment towards Francis Byrne, the follower and protege who had abandoned him. But it seemed like he wasn’t so bitter or resentful that he couldn’t find an abortionist for the young priest in his hour of need and a bent garda sergeant to sort the mess out for him afterwards.
Stefan met Dessie MacMahon in Neary’s in Chatham Street the next day. It wasn’t long after opening. Dessie sat in the corner by the back door that led out to the Gaiety Theatre, wreathed in smoke. The only other people in there were actors coming and going for rehearsal. The two policemen hadn’t seen each other in three months but Dessie asked no questions. If there was something Stefan wanted to tell him he would tell him. This was business, and it was serious business. That was clear enough from the phone call.
‘How’s it going, Dessie?’
‘Ah, you know how it is yourself.’
‘Detective Sergeant McGuinness?’
‘He’s no trouble.’ It wasn’t a compliment.
‘Inspector Donaldson?’
