about.â
Swallow chuckled mirthlessly.
âThat puts it well enough. Mallon says thereâll be trouble with the Commissioner over it. Heâll do his best to dampen it down, but heâs getting pressure on all fronts. Thereâs the Jubilee and a bloody royal visit next week. Anything could happen with the politicals when thatâs going on. And you probably know that Ces Downes died last night.â
âSure, those are problems,â Lafeyre replied, âbut theyâre not your immediate problem. Your immediate problem is a dead woman and child in the park, murdered and with no identification.â
âAnd the fact that for the first 24 hours of the investigation I thought the woman was a man. Jesus, it sounds brilliant, doesnât it?â
âThereâs some good news,â Lafeyre said. âOr at least thereâs something that might help to explain our way out of the mistake. The photographer developed his prints from the scene last night and left them at the morgue for me this morning.â
He took a manila file from his bag and brought out two photographic prints of the dead man â or woman, as it now turned out to be. One showed the body, lying under the beech trees. The other was a facial close-up, taken from directly above. The clear, circular hole showed black against the grey bone and gristle where the skin had been slashed and torn.
âItâs impossible to tell from either picture what sex this person was,â he said emphatically. âOne could only make assumptions from the clothes. Iâll warrant that if you showed that picture to any witness, including John Mallon, theyâd say it was a man. Unless someone examined the body under the clothing they couldnât know. And remember, we followed proper procedure in not disturbing the clothing at the scene.â
He handed the file to Swallow. âThereâs three sets of photographic prints here. Iâve kept one for my own records.â
It was a fair argument, Swallow acknowledged, sensing for the first time a small degree of relief.
Scollan rattled the carriage across Carlisle Bridge. The river was low, sucked out into the bay by the morning ebb tide. Screaming gulls swooped and pecked for nourishment on the brown mud and along the slime-covered embankment walls. They drove up Sackville Street towards the Nelson Pillar, encircled by the flower-sellers with their baskets, before the brougham swung down Talbot Street to its junction with Marlborough Street.
The City Morgue was a three-storey building that had once served as a schoolhouse. Its thick foundation walls of Wicklow granite, augmented by ice-blocks brought in during the winter, served to maintain low temperatures in the basement where cadavers would await examination or claim by relatives for burial.
Detective Pat Mossop, the Book Man, was climbing the steps to the building with the murder book under his arm just as Swallow and Lafeyre arrived.
Swallow told him what he had just learned from Harry Lafeyre.
âJesus, Boss.â Mossop ran his fingers through his thin hair. âIâll be put to the pin of my collar trying to put a version of this down in sensible English. And it means weâll have to brief the inquiry teams again. Now weâre looking for information about a woman and a child â not a man and a child.â
Swallow shrugged.
âWe know now that the victims are a woman and a child. But to anybody who might have seen them â any witnesses â they probably seemed to be a man and child. Just as we thought they were at first. We donât know at what point or where she took off her female clothing and put on her disguise.â
âSo we donât know what gender the victim might have seemed to be at any given time,â Mossop ventured. âI suppose she must have left her own clothing and maybe other effects somewhere. If we could find that weâd have a start,
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