Swallow was more at ease living back in the Liberties. During the previous year he rented a small house near Portobello, sharing it with his sister, Harriet. It suited her because it was close to the school in which she taught on the South Circular Road. But at the start of the new school year, and with his promotion confirmed, he had returned to live with Maria over Grant’s.

The public house had come down in the female line, but it kept the name of Maria’s grandfather Michael, who ran the business with his brother, Matthew. When Maria married Thomas Walsh in 1882 she saw no need to change it. The marriage had been happy but tragically short. Thomas drowned with his fellow crew members when the small cargo ship of which he was first officer went down in a gale off the Welsh coast five years later.

From Grant’s, it was just a ten-minute walk to the detective office at Exchange Court, beside the City Hall. On a sharp, clear morning like this the exercise was stimulating. It loosened the muscles and cleared the head for the tasks of the day. He listed them mentally as he walked. At least those he could predict. Nobody could guess what the night’s crime reports might bring in.

G-Division’s fifty-odd detectives investigated crime across the city, and were also the administration’s first and principal bulwark against political subversion. Their responsibilities ran from protecting the chief men who governed Ireland for the Crown to keeping watch on Fenians, Land Leaguers and the ever-multiplying groups that wanted, for one reason or another, to overthrow the established order.

The uniformed men who patrolled the divisions were unarmed, indistinguishable to all intents and purposes from the helmeted bobbies of any other city of the United Kingdom. But in addition to the standard police accoutrements of baton, whistle and handcuffs, every man of G-Division carried a .44 Webley Bulldog revolver.

Swallow considered what the day might bring. There was to be a public rally at the Mansion House in the afternoon. It would be addressed by the founder of the Land League, the charismatic one-armed militant Michael Davitt. Davitt was a powerful orator and would always draw a crowd. It would require half a dozen G-men, spread across the great Round Room of the Mansion House, to record the presence of suspected persons and to take down an account of what was said from the platform.

The leader of the Irish Party at Westminster, Charles Stewart Parnell, was travelling from London and would arrive at Kingstown on the four o’clock mailboat. Two G-men would be on hand. Officially they would be on protection duty, but there would be as much surveillance and intelligence-gathering involved as protecting Parnell from possible threats. They would carefully record who accompanied him, who greeted him at Kingstown and where they went.