The first blow came out of the darkness, taking her across the mouth and nose. It was solid and hard, not a fist or a hand. She felt teeth splinter in her mouth. The second blow came to the side of her head, setting off an explosion of red and yellow stars behind her eyes. Immediately she felt the warm blood flowing into her mouth and down her face. She tried to scream, but the sound caught in her throat. Her legs buckled and she pitched forwards, face downwards, into the mud.

Now the man was on her from behind. One hand came around her cheek and clamped across her mouth. The other pushed a rough rope down over her head and around her neck. The noose bit deep into her skin, and she heard him grunt as he dragged her towards where the gateway opened to the field. Once in there, she knew, it would be hopeless. She gasped for breath, scrabbling at the hand clamped across her mouth, but he was too strong and his grip too tight.

She felt mud and stones against her face as she tried to clutch at the reedy grass on the laneway’s edge. Then, a foot or two from where she knew the gate opened into the meadow, her hand found a jagged stone, perhaps the size of an apple. She fastened her fingers around it, pushed herself upwards as best she could and swung the stone with all her strength. She felt it connect with his head, and the hand across her mouth flew away. She heard him scream in pain. The rope slackened as he fell back. She drew in air, rolling, squirming away into the thorny ditch.

Now she found herself in a space of earth where the brambles had thinned. Perhaps a fox’s run or a badger trail. She tried to undo the rope that was still knotted around her neck, but her fingers were slippery with the blood from her head and face. Somewhere in the laneway she heard a shouted call. Then another. Men’s voices. Running footsteps in the fog. She started to feel a shivering warmth that travelled from her legs and then ran upwards through her body. She felt a weightlessness. Her hiding place seemed to darken, and there were no more sounds.

Saturday November 3rd, 1888

Chapter 1

Swallow disliked Saturdays. Most policemen felt that way, he reckoned. Perhaps more precisely, Swallow disliked the day that followed Friday night. Friday was payday for those citizens of Dublin fortunate enough to have employment, however poorly rewarded it might be. By late Friday night a sizeable proportion of men’s meagre wages would be on the way back to the breweries and distilleries—Arthur Guinness, John Jameson and John Power. There was always trouble on Friday nights: street fights, brawls in public houses, misadventures of every variety, with broken bodies in the hospitals and sometimes dead ones in the mortuary.