And moreover, Swallow had continued, if Vanucchi didn’t deliver, he was going to face more trouble and grief than he could handle, including a long spell behind bars. He explained the ultimatum he had delivered to the crime boss at their meeting in Hanrahan’s of Stoneybatter. But when Mossop had met Vanucchi later in the evening at the Long Hall public house on South Great George’s Street, what the criminal told him was not what he had expected to hear.

‘Your boss, Mr Swallow, and that fat super out in Rathmines, Boyle, got it wrong this time, Pat,’ Vanucchi told him as their drinks came up in the snug. ‘Nellie wasn’t killed by any of my lads. I didn’t think she was, and I told Mr Swallow that. But he said he had good information. Well, it wasn’t so good.’

Mossop still doubted. In all likelihood Vanucchi simply wasn’t prepared to squeal on one of his own men. He was trying to pin it on somebody else. But what the crime boss told him next shook him out of any such belief.

‘The story about Nellie having money left to her by Ces Downes is true enough,’ Vanucchi told him. ‘And it’s true that she had it in a post office book. But there was a lot more money in Nellie’s account than Ces ever left to her. And it wasn’t any of my boys who went after it.’

‘So who was it then?’ Mossop asked, downing a double gulp of his porter.

‘You know that she was involved with some of the dynamite crowd, the patriots, the Fenians?’

‘Sure, but she wasn’t active in anything.’

‘Don’t be so sure about that. Your young G-men working down in Monto didn’t ask all the right questions of the other girls in Gloucester Street. There’s one of them, and I won’t say who, was a close friend of Nellie’s. She told our lads when we talked to her that the Fenian crowd were using her post office account to pay off people for guns and dynamite.’

Mossop did his best not to appear taken aback. If what Vanucchi was saying was true, it was a serious lapse in G-Division intelligence. But, he acknowledged silently to himself, the young G-men assigned to monitor the red-light district were novices, still learning their trade. With their more senior colleagues stretched on security duties, they had little mentoring or guidance from more experienced officers. They could easily miss the obvious.

‘Go on.’

‘That stuff isn’t cheap. They get it bit by bit from soldiers and quarrymen and sailors, and even from the odd peeler.’

‘So,’ Mossop said cautiously, ‘how did this work?’