A June of Ordinary Murders by Conor Brady Page A

efforts.
    He left the detective office shortly after 7 o’clock for Maria Walsh’s. He turned out of Exchange Court to pass the Cork Hill Gate of the Castle where the statue of blind Justice topped the archway with her back to the city – a directional bias that was the subject of much sarcasm among Dubliners.
    He passed Christ Church, crossing the corner of Nicholas Street into High Street and on to Cornmarket. It seemed as if every tenement family had come out to breathe the evening air on the steps and pavements. Humid though it was outside, it was doubtless healthier than inside where a score of people might inhabit a couple of rooms. The odours of unwashed bodies, rancid food and human waste, smells never absent from the poor streets of Dublin, hung heavily in the air.
    On the steps of a tenement house where High Street merged into Thomas Street, a knot of people had gathered around a young man who was slowly reading aloud from a copy of the Evening Mail.
    From the rapt attention of the group and the expressions on their faces, Swallow knew that the young man was relaying the details of the morning’s horrors from the Chapelizod Gate. He saw a woman bless herself and heard another mutter, ‘Jesus, have mercy on them…’
    Maria Walsh’s public house stood on Thomas Street. It faced the Church of St Catherine that locals pointed out as the execution place of Robert Emmet in 1803. Tradition in the family had it that Maria’s great grandfather had witnessed the young revolutionary’s end.
    A narrow alley ran beside the house. He let himself in by the side door giving onto the alley and climbed the back stairs that led to the living quarters. Notionally, Swallow was the tenant of a sizeable room on the first floor with a window looking out to the street. He had use of the parlour and his meals, when his duty hours permitted, were served in the dining room by Maria Walsh’s housekeeper, Carrie, or by the day maid.
    The relationship between Joe Swallow and Maria Walsh had developed slowly and was still ambiguous.
    She had been married at 20 and widowed at 25. Her merchant sailor husband, William Walsh, lost when his ship went down with all hands off the Welsh coast on a January night in 1882, was still a presence in the house when she rented the room to Swallow two years later.
    An oilskin deck coat hung in the return hallway. A scale model of a three-masted clipper ship stood on the mantle shelf in the dining room. Occasionally an opened drawer would yield a tobacco tin or a navigation chart. And she kept her married name, reverting to her maiden name, Grant, only for legal purposes concerned with the running of the public house.
    It was not that Maria particularly needed the money. The public house into which she had been born and which she inherited from her mother did good business. And it was her home. The name over the door, ‘M & M Grant and Son’ referred to her long-deceased grandfather and great grandfather. But the emptiness and the silence at night when the last of the customers had gone were painful. And there was always a vulnerability about a house without a man, even a lodger.
    When Swallow answered her advertisement offering accommodation in the Freeman’s Journal he did not reveal that he was a policeman, only that he worked ‘in an office near Dame Street.’ She learned of his occupation six months later when an off-duty constable from the D Division station at the Bridewell recognised him in the bar one evening. The constable nodded the briefest of salutations and fled to find a hostelry where he might drink without finding himself under the eye of a G-Division detective sergeant.
    For more than a year the widow and the bachelor policeman were wary. Relations were amiable but always formal. The irregularity of his duty rosters and her hours of attendance at the bar meant that meals were rarely taken together. When it happened that they could