The City Under Siege (Stefan Gillespie), page 3
‘And the Commissioner has had a phone call from the President of St Patrick’s. Obviously, the Dean thought your attitude required some comment from the top man. Insolent, rude, offensive, all those things that I wouldn’t particularly have you down for, but then I’m not a fucking priest, am I? It would have all been very polite, but it hardly puts you in Ned Broy’s good books.’
‘You told me it was the Commissioner who wanted the case looked at.’
Gregory sat down and leant back in his chair.
‘I wasn’t expecting quite as much of the Protestant work ethic, Stevie … I can cope with a bit, but you’re going to have to learn to keep it under control. Ned Broy gets a letter that expresses concern about the fact that the investigation into this murder has ground to a halt. The daddy of the dead feller is an up-and-coming member of parliament. So, since the letter’s from a TD, on Dáil Éireann notepaper, Ned asks for the file from Maynooth and then he asks me to make sure it’s all been done by the book. I ask you to have a look and tell me what you think. What you think, Inspector, that’s all. I didn’t tell you to go out and start the fucking investigation up again, all on your fucking ownsome.’
‘You might say it was done by the book, sir. It’s a shite book.’
‘And so you thought you’d show Maynooth CID how to do it?’
‘Why ask me the question if you don’t want an answer, sir?’
‘The answer the Commissioner wants is along the lines of: there may be a few minor criticisms, a few things to chase up, but apart from that it’s a thorough, workmanlike job. Is that so hard? You didn’t have to leave the office, let alone start a row with CID in Kildare and the bloody Catholic Church. Three years ago, Ned Broy put you back in uniform for punching a priest. You’re in CID a couple of weeks and you’ve got the hierarchy foaming at the mouth about you.’
‘I didn’t ask to come into Special Branch, Superintendent.’
‘Don’t try to be clever with me, Inspector. If I want you, you’re here.’
Stefan didn’t reply. Now there was an edge to Gregory’s voice.
‘So, what should Inspector Charles have done, Stevie? You tell me.’
‘It starts with a lack of urgency, sir. You can’t list the consequences of that. You can’t buy back the time. But the main thing is the relationship between Corcoran and the man who killed him. They must have met shortly before the murder. A week, not much more. I’d say they didn’t know each other before. They probably met in Dublin. They arranged to meet again at Donadea. This was a big thing for Corcoran. Not some quick pick-up. So, where they met, how they met, these are questions that should have been asked. There’s not so many places in Dublin two queer men can hook up, or many places to go if they did. I’m not saying that’s the way it was, and I’m not saying it was that obvious, but it should have been tried. Were there places Corcoran regularly went to in Dublin – pubs, bars, pick-up spots? Was he known? Had he ever been noticed by the Guards? We should have been in Dublin with photos of him. Who saw him? Was he with anyone? It’s a shocking murder. The investigation was too small.’
‘And what do you think the Church would have made of all that? Not to mention his family. Photographs of a seminarian in every queer pub and public convenience in Dublin? And for what? You think every faery in town would queue up to tell us who was at it on a dark night in the Phoenix Park bushes?’
‘It’s not just any killing, Superintendent. It was fucking grim.’
‘You know the complaint came from the lad’s father?’
‘He’s a TD. Yes, you said.’
‘A Fianna Fáil man – with a career ahead of him right now. Word is he’s about to become a junior minister. A Cabinet seat soon … if he doesn’t mess up.’
Stefan looked harder at the superintendent’s smile. It seemed as if those words were meant to offer an obvious conclusion; they were self-explanatory.
‘Your man has a feeling the investigation wasn’t what it should have been. He passes that on to the Commissioner, because he’s an important feller, and he can. But he doesn’t know very much, except that his son was killed, brutally killed, in an attack that must seem almost random. He knows about the brutality. But it all came out of nowhere. Maybe a madman, what else? And does he know his son had sex with the man who killed him? I don’t think so. And I doubt anyone’s stuck a piece of paper in front of him and his wife with a description of what was happening by the lake minutes before their son was killed, with details of two different specimens of semen. Discretion, Inspector, doesn’t make for good investigation. But do they want pictures of their boy up in every Dublin toilet now? I doubt it very much. And one thing’s for sure, if that was happening, Rory Corcoran TD could say goodbye to his ministerial career.’
Stefan Gillespie nodded. That was the simple truth.
‘He’d be finished. Unfair, unreasonable bollocks, but who can doubt it? So, I’ll send this file back, with a few critical observations. Ned Broy will write a letter expressing his full confidence in his officers in Maynooth. And life goes on.’ Terry Gregory got up abruptly. ‘That’s it, Inspector. If you want to fit in, don’t show too much initiative. If you can’t be arsed to fit in … same advice.’
Gregory looked at Stefan, as if waiting for a response. There wasn’t one.
‘Why did you join the Guards?’
‘I’m not sure I had a reason.’ Stefan shrugged. ‘If I had, I’ve forgotten it. I left Trinity because … I didn’t like it. There was no point staying. I needed something to do. Maybe it was because my father was a policeman. Or maybe because they were looking for recruits and I couldn’t think of anything better.’
‘That’ll do. As long as you didn’t bring any principles with you.’
‘Perhaps that’s what I’ve forgotten, sir.’
Superintendent Gregory laughed. He walked across the room and stood looking out through the glass at the detectives in the room beyond. He had his hands in his pockets. He watched his men as if he didn’t much like what he was looking at. It was clear, without more words, that the conversation was over.
Stefan walked to the door. As he opened it, Terry Gregory turned.
‘You’re right. The investigation was shite. If there was a chance of identifying the killer, it’s long gone. Too much time spent keeping too much quiet. And if you read between the lines, a bit of … well, your man was fucking queer, and he got what happens to queers. So, you’re right about all that too.’
The man who killed James Corcoran left Ireland long before Stefan Gillespie saw the body in the mortuary at Naas Hospital. He left even before Inspector Charles arrived at the picnic site by the lake at Donadea, the morning after the murder. He took the mail boat from Dún Laoghaire on the night of the killing. By the time a poacher found the seminarian’s body, walking out of the Donadea woods towards the lake early the next day, the murderer was getting off a train at Euston Station in London. A great calmness had come over him after the frenzy of the assault. He knew the danger he was in and he knew he had to get away unobserved. He had gone to Donadea almost unseen from Dublin, taking two days to cycle by a roundabout route, sleeping the first night in an empty lock-keeper’s cottage by the Royal Canal and the second in the ruins of the castle at Donadea, among the all-enveloping trees. That morning he swam at the lake where they had arranged to meet. The water was cold and clean. The September sun was still warm on his body as he lay on the grass to let himself dry. They met at midday. James had cycled from Maynooth, taking backroads and boreens as well. All the secretiveness of getting there, unknown, unnoticed, was part of the excitement. This would be their place, this deserted estate, overgrown and unworked, thick with trees, with a sparkling, hidden lake at its centre. It was James’s place first, at least somewhere he had discovered, a secret space. But the man he came to meet was good at finding his way. And afterwards the man had to find his way back to Dublin, even more unnoticed, more unremarked than when he’d come. That was the sole thought in his head. He had an Ordnance Survey map and a compass. He had a change of clothes. There was blood, of course. That was easy to dispose of. He stripped naked and swam in the lake again. He put on new clothes and wrapped the old ones in a tight bundle. He wheeled his bicycle out of the trees to the road and set off, heading north towards the Royal Canal. He saw no one for several miles and when he did hear a car, then later a tractor, he had time to slip through a gate into a field. When he rode through a village, his head was down and whatever attention he attracted was the work of seconds. And it wouldn’t matter. Someone would have to stumble on the body, in a place few people went. He would be gone. He made good, fast progress. He disposed of his clothes, weighted down with stones, and then of his bicycle, in a deserted stretch of the Royal Canal. He followed the towpath into Maynooth, where he got the train into Dublin, making sure he arrived at the station with only seconds to spare, so he wasn’t standing on the platform, waiting, noticeable. By then he was very confident. And Dublin asked no questions. He ate a meal in a restaurant on Stephen’s Green, with more to drink than he was used to, then travelled out to Dún Laoghaire for the night boat to Holyhead. He had never killed before. The thought had been there sometimes, the anger had been there, perhaps a need, building in him. It had still happened without him wanting it, or knowing he wanted it. He was sorry for what he had done. He wished it hadn’t been James. He shed tears for what had happened, looking back from the boat as it steamed away from Dún Laoghaire’s lights; tears for himself rather than the dead man. Yet there was a sense of relief, too. And for a time, a very short time, it made him feel that he had torn something out of himself, that he had rid himself of the darkness, of all the passions filling him with disgust about who he was. It was done, and done in such a terrible way that surely none of those feelings could ever come back again, those feelings he could not control. Hadn’t he put a stop to it? Hadn’t he done that at least? It was a kind of sacrifice. He didn’t often pray, but he did as Ireland disappeared into black night; not for James Corcoran, the man he had butchered, but in the bright hope that what he had done had truly cleansed him.
3
Kensal Green
London, 1941
Row upon row, across London’s great suburban cemetery at Kensal Green, the avenues of the Victorian dead stretched in every direction. A derelict community of black slate and mildewed stone, modest headstones and crumbling mausoleums, miniature Greek temples and skewed Egyptian obelisks, and the red Gothic arches of a dozen tiny Albert Memorials. Watched over by angels with broken wings and chipped and blackened faces, the straight paths echoed the streets that spread out around the cemetery for mile after mile, with a kind of cacophonous decay that brought a hint of chaos to the solid certainty of the houses the dead had inhabited when they were alive.
A middle-aged man was walking along one of the tomb-lined avenues on a clear, chill January afternoon. He knew the place well. It had been a part of his childhood. He had lived in one of those solid streets. Walking through the cemetery had been the ritual of so many endless, empty Sunday afternoons. Now the cemetery had an easy, casual familiarity that he felt more comfortable with than the roads he had just taken from the Underground station at Kensal Green. Perhaps it was that hint of chaos in the tumbled stones. They reflected a truth of sorts. You had to wait for death to discover all had not really been well, in the best of all possible worlds; nothing had been certain or solid. It was part of an unwanted past as far as the man was concerned. But it was there even if he had made himself a stranger to it.
He was just over forty. A fastidious, almost obsessive concern with his appearance meant that he did worry about being forty. It felt older than it should. There were plenty of people to reassure him it was really no age. He was, after all, Ireland’s greatest actor and theatre director. He liked to say he wasn’t, but he was not unhappy to be contradicted. If growing older concerned him, mostly he pushed it aside, amused that it mattered to him at all. But here, in this forgotten place from a largely forgotten past, the awareness of age was less easily shrugged off. He already felt coming had been a mistake. The streets beyond the cemetery walls were dead to him. That hadn’t changed. They always were. They were before he knew they were. He had grown up here, but he’d left it behind in a strangely absolute and final way. He had invented a past for himself in which Kensal Green played almost no part. The child who had lived there was a ghost. It was fitting that on this rare visit his companions were ghosts too.
Along the avenue, between bare trees, in front of a crop of tombstones that leant in every direction, several dozen people stood by a heap of newly dug earth, watching as the undertakers lowered a coffin into the ground. The smell of fresh soil was in the air. The drum of a rusty gasometer rose up behind them.
Micheál Mac Liammóir was late, though there were others still behind him. No one was in a hurry. The actor’s presence was a gesture, one he was unsure he should have made. There wasn’t even an audience to appreciate it. It was unnecessary; it was inconvenient. It had involved the mail boat from Ireland, and a train through an England full of delays and wartime darkness. But as the Irishman he had become since leaving Kensal Green, funerals mattered. He had decided this one did. He owed the man a lot, though he hadn’t seen him in many years. It was the kind of sentimentality he was usually too scrupulous to allow himself. But there was a debt. There had been kindness, generosity, friendship, when he’d been unsure how to find that. The man had helped him become who he was.
Most of the mourners were men, older rather than younger. Mac Liammóir recognised some: actors, directors, artists; people he would have expected to see. He nodded and smiled the quiet, uncommunicative smiles that go with a funeral where the deceased doesn’t matter so much to the mourners’ lives. But for a moment he mattered enough. The words of the burial service surrounded these people briefly – friends, acquaintances, strangers – and bound them together. They were words that somehow you were born knowing.
‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayers; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.’ The minister looked round at the faces for some seconds, blankly, then continued. ‘We commend unto thy hands of mercy, most merciful Father, the soul of this our brother departed, and we commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’
The look was an invitation to come and cast earth on the coffin. No one moved. Then one man stepped forward. An undertaker handed him a brass trowel of soil. He tipped it on to the coffin. Micheál Mac Liammóir moved to the grave more dramatically. He bowed his head and scattered the earth, with purpose and flamboyance. As he turned there was a queue. He smiled. This was a performance at least. The dead man had every right to expect it to be properly done.
As the actor turned away from the graveside, he passed a young man, dark – Indian, he thought – looking at him with a fixed, frowning gaze. Their eyes met for only seconds, but Mac Liammóir felt a surprising intensity in the other man’s stare. There was a sort of smile, too, boyish, awkward, but it was the intensity that unsettled him. The young man wore a grey overcoat, well cut, elegant. He clutched a brown, square canvas box to his side. It hung from his shoulder. The gas mask case that not long ago everyone carried, but now seemed less essential than a tin hat. The actor nodded uncertainly and carried on. The man was still watching him. He could feel it. It was someone who knew him, perhaps someone he should have known. He didn’t recognise him. The man saw that and didn’t like it. He expected a response. There had been anger in those eyes. Mac Liammóir shrugged it away. The Indian was attractive, unquestionably. A forgotten encounter? It must have been a long time ago. Those days had gone. Well, gone for the most part.
The last scatterings of earth fell on the coffin.
‘O Father of all, we pray to thee for those whom we love, but see no longer. Grant them thy peace; let light perpetual shine upon them; and in thy loving wisdom and almighty power work in them the good purpose of thy perfect will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us evermore. Amen.’
Micheál Mac Liammóir crossed himself.
Then everyone was leaving, turning back into the avenues of the dead, exchanging quiet words about plays and friends and the war and last week’s bombing in London, unfinished sentences. The great actor was conscious of the dark young man again, gazing from some way off. He walked on, following the other mourners. He was puzzled, but more than that, he was annoyed. It was as if the man wanted something. There was an etiquette. Not remembering was a part of that. You never imposed. You never reminded. Except by invitation. It wasn’t about politeness. For some men it was about survival. A brief encounter, if that’s what it had been, should be exactly that. He had almost decided to speak to the young man, but something stopped him. It was that intensity again. Mac Liammóir’s instincts were to go. There was something troubled in the young face, a mix of desperation and anger.
A familiar voice pushed all that away.
‘Alfred!’
There was no mistaking the voice, lazy but razor-sharp, or that the name he had once been called was from the past. No one used it now. In Ireland hardly anybody knew he once carried this most English name.
‘It’s a while, Noël.’
‘Well, I suppose we’ve nodded across a crowded room from time to time. Not so long as all that. Let’s not make ourselves any older than we are, Alfred.’
Noël Coward took out a cigarette case. He offered one to Mac Liammóir. They stood for a moment, saying nothing, as one actor lit the other’s cigarette and then lit his own. The two men had known one another in childhood. They had acted together as children. For both of them it was a world that had been left behind, though only one of them had entirely erased it from his present.
