won’t be here this afternoon. I thought –’
‘I can come now. Are you at Pearse Street?’
‘No. Maybe I could meet you somewhere.’ He hadn’t planned on going into the station anyway. It was his day off. But after last night he felt that the less anyone, especially Inspector Donaldson, knew about what he was doing, the more likely it was that he would be allowed to do it.
He left the phone kiosk and carried on up Grafton Street. He turned into the little alleyway that led past the stone arch into St Teresa’s Church. There were a few early mass-goers heading that way. He could read their thoughts as they looked at his bruised face and blackened eyes. He would be better off going in through the arch and getting down on his knees than walking past. He was unaware that the fair-haired man who had been looking at the Christmas display in Switzer’s turned into the alley after him, following him as he walked on to Clarendon Street and Golden Lane, then along Bull Alley, past St Patrick’s Cathedral and into Clanbrassil Street.
The ancient cathedral was very still. It would be another hour before the great bells started to ring for the Eucharist, calling the scattered remnants of Anglican Dublin to worship in what had once been the public heart of the city. In the new Ireland it was already a forgotten backwater; the power was somewhere else now. It brooded over Dublin like a befuddled, senile uncle whose past life it wasn’t quite decent to talk about. As a child Stefan had lived on the other side of Clanbrassil Street, in the Coombe, before his father’s promotion to inspector brought a move out of the cramped flat to a suburban terrace in Terenure. For four of those years he had gone to the cathedral’s choir school. He had sung in the choir stalls at matins and evensong and the Sunday Eucharist. Matins would be over now. As he glanced across at the great stone tower, he could see the light of the stained-glass windows he had once looked up at, day after day. He heard a snatch of half-remembered music in his head; Stanford’s maybe. ‘To thee all angels cry aloud.’ He walked on towards the noise and bustle of Lower Clanbrassil Street, a narrow, crowded corridor into the city from the suburbs to the south that was always busier on a Sunday than anywhere else in Dublin.
It was the smell of bread that reminded him how he had walked home each Sunday after the Eucharist with Sam Mortimer, each of them eating a warm bagel from Weinrouk’s bakery. Mr Moiselle had always baked the bread there, but the smell of yeast and baking bread was only the first of the smells in Clanbrassil Street on a Sunday morning. He breathed it in now and other smells followed almost immediately. There was blood from the meat and poultry, slaughtered before dawn, hanging outside Myer Rubinstein’s butcher’s shop; the smell of new milk and sour cream from Jacob Fine’s dairy; through the open door of Doris Waterman’s grocer’s a pungent mix of salami and garlic sausage, salted fish and herrings, spices and pickled cucumbers. He had walked along Clanbrassil Street from time to time since he knew it as a child; as a student at Trinity in the brief, unhappy year he spent there; and as a recruit to the newly formed Garda Síochána soon afterwards, in an unforgiving uniform, to the sound of whistles and laughter from shopkeepers and their customers amused by his youth. But he had always been on the way somewhere else. He had never stopped. Today he did. He stepped into Weinrouk’s bakery, catching the sharp mix of words that was as pungent as Clanbrassil Street’s smells; the familiar voices of Dublin, the thick accents of Poland and Lithuania, and all the overlapping voices in between, loud and laughing and argumentative, peppering the English Dublin had made so distinctively its own with Yiddish.
The voices felt stranger today than they had when he was a child; then they had been too commonplace to be remarkable. Then the Yiddish simply sounded like another kind of German. His own home was a place where English and German were spoken. His mother had been determined that he should have her language too; she called it hers, even though she had been born in Dublin like him, because words were something precious to her.
In the crowded bakery he bought a bagel and the loaf of bread that he had often brought home for his German grandmother on those Sunday mornings. He would bring one back to Baltinglass for his mother today. The bagel was warm, as it always had been; he remembered that. At the counter, beside him, were two girls, aged around eight and ten, very neatly dressed, their hair in pigtails. He was surprised that Mr Moiselle spoke to them in German, not very good German it had to be said, though it may have been better Yiddish. As he handed a bag of golden, plaited loaves across the counter, he gave them a small, miniature version of the loaf. He had baked some for his grandchildren and there were two left. ‘Plaited like your hair!’
Stefan walked out behind the two girls. At the kerb was a black car he hadn’t noticed before. A man and a woman sat in the front. The man got out and opened the back door. One of the girls held up the miniature loaf. ‘It’s a present from Mr Moiselle.’ She spoke in German. The girls clambered on to the back seat. As the man shut the rear door and turned to get back into the car he suddenly looked up at Stefan. And Stefan recognised him now, from the Shelbourne the previous night; it was Adolf Mahr. The director of the National Museum wasn’t sure, but he knew he recognised this man from somewhere. He nodded politely, clearly registering the bruises on Stefan’s face but too well-mannered to show it. ‘A beautiful morning,’ he said.
‘It’s not so bad,’ replied Stefan. Mahr smiled, amused by the Irish understatement that meant, yes, it really was a beautiful morning. As the car drove away, Stefan saw there were several other people watching it head up past St Patrick’s, apparently glad to see it go. He wasn’t the only one who thought a Jewish baker’s an odd place for the leader of the Nazi Party in Ireland to shop.
He walked on, taking the hot bagel from its bag and eating it as he had eaten as a child. Crossing the street he looked back, waiting for a horse and cart to pass. A fair-haired man stopped quite abruptly to take out a packet of Senior Service. He hunched over his hands, lighting the cigarette. There was something strange. Maybe it was the abruptness; there couldn’t be that much urgency about a cigarette, even if you were gasping for one. And the man stood out somehow. Hanging about in Clanbrassil Street, among people whose most natural activity was hanging about in Clanbrassil Street, he looked like he should have been sitting in a pew in St Patrick’s Cathedral. And Stefan knew he had seen him before. The man drew on his cigarette and crossed the road, with a studied casualness that was in peculiar contrast to the abruptness of only seconds earlier. Stefan smiled. They were the actions of a man who was following someone, and wasn’t very good at it.
‘How’s the bagel?’
He turned round. ‘Good.’ He hadn’t seen Hannah approaching.
‘So much better when I was a girl. Mr Moiselle was a baker, not a businessman then.’ She stopped, staring at his face. ‘What happened?’
‘I accidentally trod on someone’s toes.’
‘Does that mean you’re not going to tell me?’
‘Taking one consideration with another –’
‘I see, a policeman’s lot –’ She was still puzzled. ‘Has it got something to do with Susan’s disappearance? Is that why you won’t –’
‘Yesterday was a strange day. Someone needed to mark his territory.’
She shrugged off the lack of communication with a smile. If he wasn’t going to tell her any more, she wouldn’t ask. But he saw it had been registered. It wouldn’t be forgotten. For now there were other things to do.
‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’
‘I can’t. I’ve got to catch the train. I’m going down to Baltinglass.’
‘Oh yes, of course, your son.’
He nodded. He didn’t say any more, but he was glad she remembered.
‘I’ve got them here,’ she said, taking a small bundle of letters from her bag. She handed them to him and he put them in his pocket. She watched as if she didn’t want to let them go. He saw how precious they were to her.
‘I’ll let you have them straight back. I’m sorry, I do have to go.’
‘Are you going to Kingsbridge?’
‘Yes.’