‘I doubt it. Dr Morrow can see her there, and she has Carrie and Tess. Lily can spend time with her too. But we can see how it works out. After a few days’ rest she should be up and about. That would be best from a medical point of view. She needs to get her body back to doing usual, normal things. And her mind too.’

Swallow felt a small twinge of comfort in Lafeyre’s words. Things would be as they were. He and Maria could resume their lives in their home above M & M Grant’s.

But now there was police business to be done. He realised that he had no idea what progress if any had been made in the murder inquiries while had been away. They had not entered his head since he had received word in Berlin about Maria. Had Charlie Vanucchi come back to Pat Mossop with any information on the identity of Ellen Byrne’s killer? Had any suspects emerged for the assault on Debbie Dunne, the young fish-seller? Had anything turned up on the murder of Alice Flannery?

He needed to get to Exchange Court. And he needed to talk to John Mallon.

Chapter 38

It was a coincidence of the clock that just around the time that Swallow was stepping off the Holyhead steam packet at Kingstown, a party of policemen, comprising plain-clothes G-Division officers and uniformed constables, was moving into position around a house at Mount Pleasant, just beyond the Grand Canal bridge at Portobello.

And it was fortuitous for Superintendent ‘Duck’ Boyle that the operation to arrest the chief suspect in the murder of the young prostitute Helena Moyles, alias Ellen Byrne, alias Nellie Sweet, was taking place within his area of jurisdiction, the E-Division. The division stretched from the canal to Rathmines in one direction and to the southern shore of Dublin Bay in the other. It was, after all, Boyle’s unnamed informant who had first intimated that Nellie’s killer might be an associate of criminal boss Charlie Vanucchi. Yet, in the event, it turned out that the information was unsound.

When Vanucchi had sent a message on the previous day asking to meet Detective Sergeant Mossop, Mossop anticipated that he was going to be told the name of that associate. He had been sceptical at first when Swallow told him to expect Vanucchi to give him a name. Why would Charlie want to inform on one of his own?

‘You’ve heard the expression “there’s no honour among thieves”, Pat,’ Swallow had grinned. ‘Well, it’s not quite true. There are rules even among Dublin criminals. There’s live and let live. And if some thief has broken the rules and raised the stakes by murdering a working girl up in Monto, the rest of the tribe aren’t going to shelter him.’