Pat Mossop waved the flimsy paper from the ABC telegraph. Every three hours the noisy machine spewed out crime intelligence that came in from the police forces across the United Kingdom and were collated in London at New Scotland Yard.

‘Mary Jane Kelly. The Yard says she’s the fifth. Found with her throat cut in Whitechapel. A lady of the night, like the others. Born in Limerick, would you believe . . . one of our own? About twenty-five years of age, it says here. Christ, it’s barbaric.’

The Saturday-morning crime conference at Exchange Court was tense and despondent. London had the Ripper, but Dublin had its own problems.

‘A week on from the Flannery girl’s murder and we’re nowhere. Absolutely bloody nowhere,’ Mossop complained to no one in particular. ‘Now we’ve another young girl hammered to within an inch of her life on Misery Hill,’ he added. ‘We’re no better than the savages in the East End of London.’

None of the G-men or uniformed officers at the crime conference could summon a word to counter Mossop’s pessimism on the Alice Flannery murder.

‘There’s nothing to say it’s anything more than coincidence,’ Mick Feore said. ‘It’s a big city with a lot of people.’

‘Of course,’ Swallow agreed. ‘But attacks like this on women are rare. We can just hope we haven’t got some lunatic trying to match what’s happening across the water.’

Debbie Dunne, the young fish-woman attacked the night before, was sedated and reportedly stable at the Royal Hospital on Baggot Street. Sergeant Stephen Doolan and Detective Johnny Vizzard were by her bedside to hear what she would have to say when the laudanum the doctors had given her wore off.

‘Maybe if there’s a connection between the two attacks, this Dunne girl can give us something useful,’ Swallow ventured. ‘She might have a description at least. And she’s alive, thank God.’

Any G-men who could be spared from political inquiries had been deployed across the city during the week, interviewing anyone who had knowledge of Alice Flannery’s life: school-friends, acquaintances, neighbours who had moved on from Blackberry Lane. Each of her fellow workers at the New Vienna restaurant had been questioned too, but no promising lines of inquiry had presented themselves.

Each evening the G-men returned to Exchange Court to feed whatever scraps of information they had gleaned to Feore for inclusion in the murder book. Nothing of substance came in. The girl had no enemies. She was not involved in any relationship. G-men checked with the moneylenders on the south side of the city, but found only that she had never borrowed money and had no debts. By week’s end there was nothing that might be construed as a motive for her killing.