‘Don’t let it worry you, Joe,’ Mallon said. ‘Sometimes one’s instincts get knocked off course too. That’s all that happened. I’d have probably gone for Werner as the most likely suspect myself. Though you’ve got to give credit to Feore. He had doubts where both of us believed the evidence pointed in one direction.’ He laughed. ‘And we managed to get the misers in the Upper Yard to fund your visit to Berlin. That’s an achievement, even if it led nowhere.’

‘I know, chief.’ Swallow threw back a mouthful of the whiskey. ‘But I’d have put money on Werner as our man. He’s a slimy, slippery bastard. And if he’s not guilty of Alice Flannery’s murder, I’ll wager he’s guilty of something else. I didn’t believe his story about being with someone else’s wife when he spun it, and I don’t believe it now.’

‘It’s not relevant now, at any event,’ Mallon said. ‘He wouldn’t be the first suspect to come up with that sort of thing. And you wouldn’t be the first policeman whose instincts told him it was all bull. Did he say why he fled from the New Vienna when you and Vizzard went to arrest him? If he had nothing to hide, he wouldn’t have run.’

‘I think in Germany when the police come calling for you, most people try to make themselves scarce,’ Swallow said. ‘But there might be a more specific reason. Pat Mossop got word from a pal of his in the excise office that Mr Werner owes a lot of money to the Crown, built up over the years for imported wines and spirits at the New Vienna. Maybe he thought we were coming to collect it.’

‘If that’s the case, the excise people will get their due. They always do,’ Mallon mused. ‘Right now, just be thankful that you held back and didn’t charge him. That was good judgement too. So be thankful that we don’t have to explain our way out of that.’

Swallow knew he was right.

‘I shouldn’t have been taken in by Dan Flannery either,’ he said ruefully. ‘Mossop has checked out that alibi. Flannery said he’d been seen at Huband Bridge by this fellow Geoffrey Bradley, his teacher from Synge Street. But it turns out that Geoffrey Bradley is also Seathrún Ó Brolcháin. It’s the Irish version of the name. And he’s a member, along with young Flannery, of the Hibernian League. These patriot fellows will swear a hole in a tin bucket to protect each other. Giving a brother-member an alibi in a police investigation wouldn’t be a big thing.’

‘It should have been checked earlier,’ Mallon said. ‘Did we have him on our books?’