A June of Ordinary Murders by Conor Brady

about.’
    Swallow chuckled mirthlessly.
    â€˜That puts it well enough. Mallon says there’ll be trouble with the Commissioner over it. He’ll do his best to dampen it down, but he’s getting pressure on all fronts. There’s the Jubilee and a bloody royal visit next week. Anything could happen with the politicals when that’s going on. And you probably know that Ces Downes died last night.’
    â€˜Sure, those are problems,’ Lafeyre replied, ‘but they’re not your immediate problem. Your immediate problem is a dead woman and child in the park, murdered and with no identification.’
    â€˜And the fact that for the first 24 hours of the investigation I thought the woman was a man. Jesus, it sounds brilliant, doesn’t it?’
    â€˜There’s some good news,’ Lafeyre said. ‘Or at least there’s 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.’
    He took a manila file from his bag and brought out two photographic prints of the dead man – 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.
    â€˜It’s impossible to tell from either picture what sex this person was,’ he said emphatically. ‘One could only make assumptions from the clothes. I’ll warrant that if you showed that picture to any witness, including John Mallon, they’d say it was a man. Unless someone examined the body under the clothing they couldn’t know. And remember, we followed proper procedure in not disturbing the clothing at the scene.’
    He handed the file to Swallow. ‘There’s three sets of photographic prints here. I’ve kept one for my own records.’
    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.
    â€˜Jesus, Boss.’ Mossop ran his fingers through his thin hair. ‘I’ll be put to the pin of my collar trying to put a version of this down in sensible English. And it means we’ll have to brief the inquiry teams again. Now we’re looking for information about a woman and a child – not a man and a child.’
    Swallow shrugged.
    â€˜We know now that the victims are a woman and a child. But to anybody who might have seen them – any witnesses – they probably seemed to be a man and child. Just as we thought they were at first. We don’t know at what point or where she took off her female clothing and put on her disguise.’
    â€˜So we don’t know what gender the victim might have seemed to be at any given time,’ Mossop ventured. ‘I suppose she must have left her own clothing and maybe other effects somewhere. If we could find that we’d have a start,