The clerk-constable on duty took less than five minutes to locate three files under the name of Michael James Carmody. DCR was acknowledged as a model of its kind, and police forces from across the kingdom had visited Dublin to see and learn from its operation. Latterly it had been organised on the decimal system of library classification, devised more than a decade previously by one Melvil Dewey of New York.

‘Take yer pick there, Inspector.’ The clerk dropped the three bulky folders onto the counter in front of Swallow. ‘There’s another score of Carmodys there too. There’s a couple of Michael Johns and Michael Josephs. There’s even a Michael Marmeduke, if you don’t mind. Sure, you know yerself, a lotta them fellas drop names and pick up new ones to suit themselves.’

Swallow knew that too well. It was little more than twenty years since the authorities had introduced the compulsory registration of births. Anyone born before 1836 could change identity more or less at will since there were no central records, and local baptismal records were notoriously unreliable and inadequate. But according to Pfaus’s telegram, Michael James Carmody was born in 1865. If he had a criminal record it was less likely that he could succeed in leaving his past behind.

Nor did he. The topmost file showed a birth date of June 2nd 1865 for Michael James Carmody, born at the vast workhouse known as the South Dublin Union, to Mary Anne Carmody, aged eighteen years. Father: unknown. Mother’s occupation: none stated. She was probably a street-girl, on the bottom rung of Dublin prostitution. Hardly the best start in life, Swallow reflected, for baby Michael James.

Yet remarkably, he had just two convictions. Petty theft at twelve years of age. And then, at sixteen years, a conviction for assault that drew a sentence of eighteen months’ imprisonment at Mountjoy. The file showed his last known address in Dublin as a tenement house in Gardiner Street. His last recorded employment stated him to be a kitchen porter at the Dolphin Hotel, Essex Street, Dublin.

If, as the Berlin police appeared to have been told, Carmody had been employed at the New Vienna in South Great George’s Street, it was not recorded in the Criminal Registry. That was not necessarily surprising, Swallow knew. The filing system was superb; information could be retrieved within minutes, but details were frequently out of date. The system could only give out what had at one stage or another been put into it. It was simply impossible to keep every file up to date with the most recent information. The full facts about anyone who figured in the files at DCR almost always had to be established by the time-tested methodology of knocking on doors and asking hard questions.

It was time to put a few of those questions to Stefan Werner.

Chapter 29