‘Lafeyre will be here in a while to fill us in. He’s had Nellie Byrne down to the morgue for a post-mortem. The room was like a wreck. Apart from the blood on the floor, on the walls, on the inside of the door, everywhere, it was clear the place had been tossed. Whoever killed Ellen Byrne seems to have been searching for something in particular. I’d have said she put up a mighty struggle around the room.’

‘What was the young bobby from Store Street saying back there?’ Swallow asked.

Mallon gestured to Stephen Doolan.

‘You tell Inspector Swallow about it. You seem to know the story.’

Doolan sighed.

Swallow nodded a silent good morning to Harry Lafeyre as he entered the room.

‘35C Pat Cummins isn’t the fittest man in the force,’ Doolan went on. ‘He’s within an ace of retirement, overweight, drinks and eats too much, and he’s as slow as Findlater’s clock.’

‘I talked to him at the scene,’ Lafeyre said. ‘I think he’s probably suffering from diabetes. He shouldn’t be on outdoor duties at all in my view.’

‘Whatever the case,’ Doolan went on, ‘he says he tried to catch up with this individual but he lost him in the fog. Didn’t get much sight of him for most of the way, but he got one good look at him under the street lamp at the Gloucester Diamond.’

Mallon shrugged.

‘Tell Inspector Swallow what Cummins 35C says about this fellow.’

Doolan looked momentarily embarrassed.

‘He said he thought he’d seen him before. He couldn’t say where or when. But he’s got a notion that he might be a policeman.’

Monday November 12th, 1888

Chapter 22

The superintendents of the DMP’s six uniformed divisions worked their men hard in the weeks that followed the murder of Ellen Byrne, alias Nellie Sweet, in her room at Chapel Court.

Hundreds of individuals were stopped, searched and questioned in the hours of darkness under the provisions of the Dublin Police Act in the winter hunt across the city. Most of them were known to the constables and the sergeants as petty criminals, vagrants, beggars or layabouts. All were questioned closely. Some, who were unable to give a full account of themselves, or who aroused suspicion for some other reason, were arrested and handed over to G-Division detectives for further interrogation. But the interviews yielded nothing more than a few tip-offs about stolen property and petty crimes in the planning.