The servants observed the fiction of attending to the tenant’s room in accordance with respectability and convention. Each morning Swallow would leave his soiled clothing in the linen basket in his room to be collected for laundering later in the day by Tess, Maria’s housemaid. Every evening Tess carefully laid out a clean collar and shirt at the foot of the bed and changed the water in the glazed pitcher on the washstand.

It required concentration to work with the razor, soap and cold water in the dim morning light. Although most of the G-men followed the fashion of the time with moustaches or beards, Swallow preferred to go clean-shaven. It made him look younger than his forty-three years, he reckoned. Maria said she thought so too.

The morning darkness had not fully dissipated when he stepped out into Thomas Street through the side door that gave private access to the living quarters above the public house.

At St Catherine’s Church, where the rebel Robert Emmet had been executed after the abortive insurrection of 1803, he saw that the November frost had whitened the classical pediment and the black roof slates. He passed the Municipal Art School where on Thursday afternoons, duty permitting, he indulged his sole diversion from police work in the painting class led by Maria’s sister, Lily. Then he crossed High Street and Corn Market before flanking Christ Church Cathedral towards the Castle.

The streets were quiet. Dubliners were neither early to bed nor early risers. The city’s trams did not stir until eight o’clock, when they started from their depots. Shops did not open their doors until half past nine. Many professional men considered it unseemly to be at their rooms before ten. The only sign of life at this hour was a uniformed constable, motionless and solid, surveying the silent thoroughfare from Lamb Alley.

He caught the tang of hops from Guinness’s brewery at St James’s Gate, and a couple of hundred yards farther on the husky smell of barley wafted in the air from Power’s distillery on John’s Lane. It was telling, he sometimes reflected, that while other cities might smell of coal or food or human sweat, Dublin smelled primarily of alcoholic drink in the making.

He quickened his pace so that he would be at his desk by eight o’clock to review the night’s crime reports from the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s seven divisions. Any serious business, he knew, would very likely come from A, B, C or D, which served the city within the canals. E-Division and F-Division, covering the affluent suburbs to the south as far as Dalkey, rarely saw much crime or outrage.