‘Simple enough. The Americans gather dollars, convert them into pounds and send them over here. The Fenians are all known to the police, and they know that your fellows have agents watching transactions in all the banks. It’s too risky for them to shift any money about. So the money gets lodged into Nellie’s post office account and she draws it out to pay these fellows who come to her pretending to be clients. Well, maybe some of them are clients for all we know. But basically, Nellie was passing on money to pay for guns and dynamite for the Fenians. She was a sort of banker.’

Mossop tried not to sound impressed.

‘All right, that’s not especially significant information, Charlie. But I’ll see that you get looked after with a nice few quid if it turns out to be solid. It still doesn’t tell me what I came to find out, and that’s who killed Nellie?’

‘Ah, but there’s more, Mr Mossop. A lot more. Nellie told her friend that she believed she’d been rumbled by some of your friends in the Castle. This English officer, she said, seemed to have twigged the thing, and he was seeing a lot of her, pumping her for details of the transactions. He told her he loved her. He’d take her away to England and all that. Of course, she didn’t believe him. But she liked to hear him say it.’

Vanucchi sipped at his whiskey.

‘Now, on the night Nellie was killed her friend saw that English officer visiting her. And she knows his name.’

‘You’ll give me that name, I suppose, Charlie.’

‘I will, Mr Mossop.’ Vanucchi tapped his whiskey glass. ‘But first, you’ll need to buy me another.’

Chapter 39

‘I want an interview with Smith Berry,’ Swallow said. ‘I’ll have it. After that I want to talk to the chief secretary. If it comes to it I’ll go to the lord lieutenant, or I’ll go to London to the bloody prime minister.’

‘Will you please sit down and stop pacing up and down like a wild animal above in the Zoological Gardens?’ Mallon said firmly. ‘I’ll ask Smith Berry for a meeting, but he may not want to agree to it. I’ve already asked him to see me and he’s put me off twice so far.’

‘He’ll see me if I have to knock down the blasted door,’ Swallow snarled. ‘I want Kelly’s head. I want him out of his job, out of the Castle, out of bloody Ireland. They can send him to Africa or China. With any luck he’ll get skewered by the natives or boiled alive in a pot.’