‘She died.’
‘Unfortunately that also happens.’
‘Do you remember her? Her name was Susan Field.’
‘Why do you want to know about this?’
‘She didn’t die because she couldn’t get to a hospital in time. She died because the guard didn’t bother to take her there. Either he let her die or he killed her.’
She was silent again. He knew she remembered that night.
‘We found her body buried in the Dublin Mountains.’
‘Unpleasant as that is, it doesn’t mean she was killed.’
‘I know she was killed. That’s my job.’
‘And my job is to provide a place of refuge.’
Stefan’s opinion of that place of refuge was written on his face.
‘People want their sewers to run under the streets, Sergeant, out of sight and out of smell. Isn’t that part of your job too? You’re a policeman. When I pray for the women in my charge it’s not because the people who send them here don’t need praying for too. But I leave that to others.’ The contempt in her voice was not for the women who were locked away behind the convent walls.
He looked at her hard. In those last words there was almost contact, not sympathy, but something.
‘You don’t seem very surprised by any of this.’
‘It’s a long time since what men do to women has surprised me.’
‘Did you know the men who brought her here?’
She hesitated, but she had made her decision.
‘I saw the guard. He carried her in. The other man stayed outside in the car.’
It made sense. Moran was a big man. It wouldn’t have been difficult. She was giving him what she knew now. If she didn’t know the man in the car was a priest it wasn’t going to help to tell her, let alone tell her about the other priest, the one in Earlsfort Terrace, who had arranged it all and wanted it covered up.
‘You knew the guard?’
‘I think he’d brought women here before.’
‘Not in that state.’
She shook her head.
‘But that wasn’t why I recognised him. I remembered him from a pilgrimage to Lourdes, with some of the sisters. It was about five years ago now. General O’Duffy was taking a Garda pilgrimage at the same time. He was the Commissioner then. We were all on the same train through France. When we got to Lourdes he sent some of his lads to carry our luggage to the hostel. It was the guard who brought my suitcase. I didn’t know his name.’
‘You could testify that he was here that night?’
‘No, I’m not in the business of testifying, Sergeant Gillespie.’
‘But you just said — ’
‘You have your job to do in the sewers, and I have mine. That’s all.’
When Stefan left the office, Mother Eustacia got up and pulled a thick foolscap book from a bookshelf. She took it back to her desk. It was a diary for 1934, a daybook with a page for every day of the year, where she noted everything that happened in the Convent of the Good Shepherd. She opened it at the twenty-sixth of July. It was the Feast of St Anne, the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She carefully tore out the page and screwed it up. Then, without looking down, her hand reached for her rosary.
There were several pubs close to Dublin Castle that almost belonged to Special Branch. The same pubs the men of the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s G Division had drunk in fifteen years earlier when they were hunting some of the men who stood at the same bars now. Since you could never quite tell in those days whether the Special Branch man on the corner stool was collecting information for the British or passing information about the men he was drinking with on to Michael Collins, assassinations in pubs could be counter-productive. It was safer all round to kill British intelligence officers when they were at home. The pubs all had different functions then and it was the same now. There were pubs for getting drunk in, pubs for meeting informants in, and pubs where your inspector was unlikely to find you. Farrelly’s in Crane Lane had a small snug at the back, with a door to the jacks and a yard that led to an exit into Essex Street. Detective Sergeant Jimmy Lynch was in the snug when Stefan Gillispie arrived. He was eating a plate of rashers and drinking a mug of tea. He seemed amused to see Stefan again. It had been a long time.
‘How’s the farming going, Stevie?’
Stefan sat down. He knew Lynch’s grin wouldn’t last.
‘Can I get you something?’
‘I’m grand, thank you, Jimmy.’
‘You’ll be back on the job before long, I’d say.’
‘Maybe. We’ll have to see.’
‘A man of mystery, eh?’
‘Was Sean Og in this morning?’
‘Are you looking for him?’
‘I will be at some point.’
‘No. He done himself a bit of damage. Says he’s broken a rib.’ Lynch was looking at Stefan more cautiously. It wasn’t an idle visit. He needed to know what it meant.
‘He did me a bit of damage too. Nothing broken. I won’t show you.’
‘When was this?’ The Special Branch man was uneasy. He didn’t know why there should have been any contact between Moran and Stefan. Beating up another detective on his instructions was one thing; that was work. Sean Og sometimes needed reining in, but still, it was only a fight.
‘Last night, Jimmy. He was trying to kill me at the time.’
‘He goes at it after a few — ’ Lynch laughed, but he didn’t like this.
Stefan took the captive bolt pistol from his pocket and put it on the table. Lynch looked at it. He knew what it was, but that was all he knew.
‘You’ve pigs to kill down on the farm then,’ he grinned.
‘Remember Susan Field?’ continued Stefan, watching the detective closely. ‘You took over the investigation into her death, last time we talked. I hear you didn’t get far. The State Pathologist thought she’d been shot in the head with a captive bolt pistol. You said you didn’t. But that’s the gun. You might remember Vincent Walsh. He was buried in a little plot next to Susan’s on Kilmashogue. You’d know him best for the letters Monsignor Robert Fitzpatrick wrote to him, the ones you sold to Hugo Keller. Wayland-Smith said he’d been shot in the head with a captive bolt pistol too. And that’s the gun that shot them both.’
‘What makes you think that?’ Lynch was choosing his words carefully now. He didn’t understand and he didn’t know where this was going. But if he was thrown by the mention of the letters it didn’t show.
‘Sean Og tried to put a hole in my head with it last night.’
Detective Sergeant Lynch was not often surprised; he prided himself on being too well informed for that. But he was certainly surprised now.
‘I see. So what are you going to do, Stevie?’ he asked.
‘I don’t have any witnesses, that’s the trouble.’
‘If that’s true then all you’ve got is a gun from a slaughterhouse.’ Lynch spoke slowly. He didn’t know why Stefan was showing him a weaker hand.
‘You’ll have to do something, Jimmy. It’s pushing it, even for Special Branch. You’ve got a guard who’s murdered two people. It could have been three. What are you going to do, leave him where he is until the next time?’
Lynch’s lips tightened. There was conviction in Stefan’s words. He couldn’t just dismiss them.
‘He did kill them, Jimmy.’
‘You know that?’
‘I know it.’
‘Let’s say he did. Do you know why?’
