A June of Ordinary Murders by Conor Brady Read Free Book Online Page B

be Fenian agents from America, he thought. It turned out they were two Canadian students from Trinity College, celebrating examination results.
    The duty sergeant was taking a statement from a commercial traveller from Antwerp who had been relieved of his wallet, his watch and his trade samples during a night’s socialising. He remembered meeting a young lady in Grafton Street sometime before midnight, but he had no clear recollection of how he had ended up in ‘Monto,’ the city’s red-light district on the other side of the river.
    Officially, the G-Division detective office was in Dublin Castle. But this was an administrative conceit. Exchange Court was a blind, sunless alley on the northern flank of the Castle proper. Incongruously, its nearest neighbour was a pet shop, specialising in exotic species where the alley abutted onto Dame Street.
    Swallow was glad to be out of the glare of the sun, even if the grimy corridors of the detective office were airless.
    A couple of G-men queried him as he made his way to the crime sergeants’ room that he shared with four other officers of his own rank. The grim news from the Chapelizod Gate had travelled quickly. Violence and sometimes murder were not unknown in Dublin, but even the hard men of the G Division were shocked by the reports coming in from the crime scene.
    His first task was to brief his boss, Detective Chief Superintendent John Mallon.
    John Mallon was at the height of his reputation. The G Division’s chief was reputedly more influential than the head of the force, Commissioner David Harral. It was said that Chief Secretary Balfour considered him more important to the success of government policy in Ireland than the Security Secretary – or the Assistant Under-Secretary for Security, to give him his official title.
    His work on the Cavendish and Burke murders had put his reputation beyond argument. Now aged 55, he had the option of retirement on a full and generous pension. But it was clear that Mallon preferred to hold to his career and his place at the centre of the country’s security apparatus.
    His masters in the Dublin Castle administration wanted to hold on to Mallon too. It was understood in administrative circles that he would probably go beyond his present grade of Detective Chief Superintendent to the Commissioner ranks. In the order of things at Dublin Castle, that sort of progression for the son of a poor Catholic farmer from County Armagh would be without precedent.
    Each day and night brought Mallon’s office a tally of shootings and burnings from around the country. There were confrontations between the constabulary and the tenantry at public meetings. Burnings of landlords’ properties were reported nightly. Judges, magistrates and landlords were under constant threat and could operate only under armed protection. The Royal Irish Constabulary itself was stretched to breaking point and required reinforcement from the military in many areas.
    The action in the land war was on the farms and in the rural areas, but it was planned and directed by men who lived and worked in the city. While the rural police and magistracy were the administration’s front-line defence against the agitation; they too were directed from the city; from Dublin Castle, to be precise.
    Balfour privately acknowledged that four decades after the ravages of the Great Famine, the lot of the Irish smallholders was still indefensible. In England and Wales the poorest farmers and their families lived securely in the ownership of their properties. In Ireland, by contrast, families still worked the land without security of tenure, while struggling to pay high rents to English landlords or their Irish agents.
    The potential fusing together of the land campaign with a renewed demand for Home Rule was a constant threat. It was the Westminster government’s worst nightmare.
    Shortly after the murders of Cavendish and Burke, Parnell had founded