‘You know you’ll be getting more of a bollocking than a briefing from him?’
Stefan smiled. ‘Let’s get on with it so.’
‘He’s busy at the moment. He’ll be out at Corbawn Lane later.’
‘Corbawn Lane where –’
‘Where Mrs Harris’s car was. It’s where he dumped her in the sea.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘The only instructions I’ve got are that you’re a fucking messenger boy and that’s how you’re to be treated. You’re not a fucking detective. You’re not part of the fucking investigation. Nobody’s to tell you anything about anything, or give you even a sniff of the job. You’ll be bollocked when the super’s got the time. Apart from that, Mr Gregory didn’t tell me to welcome you aboard, but I’m sure if he wasn’t so busy he would have.’
They walked out of Garda Headquarters.
‘I tell you what I’d like to do?’ Stefan gave Dessie a wry smile. It was a long time since he’d been this close to a murder. ‘Have a look at Herbert Place. That’s where she was killed? So if you were the first one in there –’
‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’
‘Yes, so it’ll be more than your job’s worth. Is that right?’
Detective Sergeant MacMahon grinned.
‘With a bit of luck.’
*
‘Blood.’
As Detective Sergeant Dessie MacMahon started to climb the stairs of the big Georgian terrace in Herbert Place he pointed at the fifth tread, without stopping. Sergeant Stefan Gillespie did stop, bending to look down at the dark, densely patterned stair carpet; red, black, yellow, thistle-like flowers endlessly repeated. Only the chalk marks showed him where to look; a small brown stain stood out against yellow and red.
‘Blood.’
Dessie pointed at two of the uprights on the grey-painted banister. It was a long time since they had been painted. Again only traces of chalk made the smears of brown that could have been almost anything, or even nothing at all, immediately visible.
‘Blood.’
As he carried on Dessie’s left hand gestured at a chalk circle beside two crooked picture frames. They had been recently knocked askew; an oval, ebonised frame enclosing a sepia photograph of a heavily bearded man in a frock coat; a chipped, gilt square of plasterwork surrounding a sampler that was a map of Ireland with the counties outlined in green thread. Between them another streak of something brown marked the muddy swirls of the embossed wallpaper. Where the frames had moved they revealed that once the indeterminate colour of the wallpaper had been a startling emerald green. There was little wallpaper to be seen however.
The staircase wall, like the walls of the hall and the landing above it, was lined with pictures, maps, photographs; paintings of dogs and horses; faded prints of flowers; maps of Ireland, Britain, India, the Mediterranean. The mostly Victorian men and women who gazed out of the heaviest frames, with a mixture of confidence and disapproval, looked old whatever age they were. It was all heavy, dark, as if the images and colours lining the walls had faded into a uniform smog.
Dessie stopped as the staircase turned to the right, on to the landing, where the repeated pattern of the carpet stretched left and right along the corridor, between the gloomy, embossed walls and the grey-painted doors. It was lighter here though. A window gave on to Herbert Place below. Dessie was slightly breathless. A larger, elliptical chalk circle spread out on to the landing from the top stair; the bloodstains were clearer here.
‘She must have been carried out the bedroom. But the body was put down here a moment. There’s more blood on the walls up there, and on the pictures.’ Dessie gestured to the left, along the corridor, where several more prints and photographs hung at odd angles. ‘Either he put her down or he dropped her.’
Stefan looked. Dessie walked on past two closed doors.
The third door was open. Through it was a big bedroom as cluttered and claustrophobic as the hall and the landing. There were clear signs of a struggle: smashed ornaments, pictures knocked off the walls, a broken chair, a table on its side, sheets and blankets pulled across the big bed on to the floor. But where the smell in the hallway and on the landing was of polish and dust and years of airlessness, the smell here was of smoke and burnt wood; not strong but acrid and sharp.
Dessie took out a packet of Sweet Afton and lit a cigarette. Stefan walked into the centre of the room. There were two small rugs, though it was clear the rest of the floor had been covered until recently too. The floorboards were grimy with age but they had only been varnished at the edges of the room. A carpet must have covered the area in front of the bed, though it wasn’t there now. Close to the bottom of the bed the floorboards were blacker than elsewhere, charred. Stefan looked at the black patch and bent down. He rubbed something that was like charcoal on to his fingers.
‘Just in time, I’d say.’
Dessie nodded. ‘When the maid came in there was an electric fire on. It must have been going full pelt for a couple of days. The boards were starting to burn underneath. If she hadn’t come back when she did the place would have gone up so. She threw a bucket of water over it.’ He laughed and drew in some more smoke. ‘She fused the whole house, but it did the trick.’
‘So do you think it was deliberate? Starting a fire?’
‘I’d say not,’ replied Dessie. ‘There’d have to be better ways to do that. No, this was where she was killed and there was a lot of blood. Someone tried to clean it up. There’s soap mixed with the blood. The story is he put the fire on to dry the floor, then left. But as he never came back –’
Stefan was still looking down at the floor.
‘What happened to the carpet?’
‘The State Pathologist took some of the rugs and the bedclothes, but the carpet had gone already. Your man must have had it. It would have been soaked looking at what’s round the room. Maybe he brought it with him. Maybe he wrapped the body in it. There’s not a lot of blood in the car. She was on the back seat, so she must have been covered in something anyway.’
‘So with all this blood – she was stabbed? Is there a weapon?’
‘I’ll show you where the axe was. We’ll go out the back way.’
The garden that led down to the mews at the back of the house in Herbert Place was neatly kept, but it was bare and grey. Squares of grass and small, dark rhododendrons; tightly clipped bushes took up the flower beds. When the spring came there would be few enough flowers to give colour. Dessie pointed out several chalk-marked stains on the stone paved path that led to the two-storey mews; a little more blood to mark where the body had been half-dragged and half-carried from the house.
They walked through a door into the gutted stables that had once housed the family’s horses, and now smelt of the leaked engine oil that stained the stone floor. There were a couple of bicycles, some garden tools, a workbench full of spanners and wrenches, rusty and cobwebbed. Against one wall was a pile of cut turf, with sticks for the fires stacked beside it. Dessie stood by the turf and kicked at it.
‘There was a small hatchet here, under a pile of turf. There’s a gardener comes in now and again. He uses it for splitting wood for a bit of kindling. So it was kept in the garage. It had a good wash but there was still blood on it. They think it was maybe hot water, so instead of the blood running away it coagulated. They reckon it must be what killed her though.’
He walked across the empty garage to the double doors.
‘Mrs Harris’s car was kept in here. So he must have brought the body in, then shoved her on to the back seat. Bit tight in a Baby Austin. Timings aren’t very clear. Only one sighting of the car. It was probably dark when he left.’
Detective