Swallow saw the flash of annoyance again in Mallon’s eyes. And he saw Mallon watching him, reading his own mood. He recalled what his boss had once told him after a clash with a particularly obnoxious civil servant: ‘Forgive thine enemies . . . but bloody well remember their names and addresses.’

The maid had started to clear away the dinner plates when a bell jangled on the wall beside the mantle. Mallon came to alert.

‘Front door,’ he said unnecessarily, rising from his chair. ‘I’ll see who it is.’

Swallow could hear the short, muffled exchange from the hallway before Mallon came back into the room. He did not resume his seat at the dining table.

‘You’ll have to excuse us, dear,’ he told his wife. ‘The assistant under-secretary for security wants to see me with Detective Inspector Swallow in his office immediately.’

Chapter 43

The man sitting beside Howard Smith Berry reminded Swallow of nothing as much as a lean hunting dog. Deep, cold eyes were set in a long, cavernous face. He was perhaps forty years of age. A heavy moustache framed thin, unsmiling lips. His sandy hair, turning to grey, was neatly parted in the middle. He wore the standard well-cut dark suit of the senior bureaucrat, with starched white collar and cuffs and a neat bow-tie in dark silk.

Swallow had never met him. But he knew the chief secretary for Ireland, Arthur Balfour, by sight. He had worked on his protection detail on a number of occasions since his appointment as the head of the British administration in Ireland almost two years previously.

‘Bloody Balfour,’ as he was commonly referred to by Irish nationalists, was no ordinary civil servant. His uncle, Lord Salisbury, was prime minister. He was reputed to be the wealthiest minister in the government. The Balfour family fortunes were grounded in the lucrative business of provisioning the forces holding the empire in India. He had earned his unflattering soubriquet through his zealous promulgation of stern measures to suppress agrarian unrest and by his implacable opposition to Home Rule for Ireland. His Coercion Act, passed into law a year previously, had given the Crown extraordinary powers to suppress opposition and dissent, including the suspension of trial by jury.

It was evident from the moment that Swallow and Mallon crossed the Upper Yard to Smith Berry’s office that this was not to be a routine briefing or anything such. Two of Kelly’s secret service men, swaddled in heavy winter coats that bulged with concealed firearms, guarded the doorway. Two others were posted on the landing outside the under-secretary’s office.