A June of Ordinary Murders Read Online Free Page A

blue official jacket. It was worn and it smelled of woodsmoke and sweat. Inside, the lining was holed and torn. But there were no stains or damp spots that might indicate hurried washing. The pockets contained a few pennies, a pipe and a tobacco pouch, a dirty handkerchief and rosary beads.
    He scrutinised the man’s extended hands and turned them over. They were calloused and ingrained. Rims of black dirt lay under the fingernails, but there was no blood. These were not the hands or the clothing of a man who had committed the butchery in the copse of pine and beech.
    â€˜All right,’ Swallow conceded. ‘Go along with the constables. Make your statement and then go home. You’ve had a bad morning.’
    Swallow estimated that even if the man was a poacher on the side, he was in this instance at least an honest witness.
    Doolan came across the grass, having briefed his men. He drew his half-hunter watch from his pocket and read the hour. It was coming up to 9 o’clock.
    â€˜Do you want some breakfast? They’ll still be serving in the canteen at Kilmainham. You’ll want to make a report to the Castle – to get some of your own fellows up here from Exchange Court.’
    Swallow had eaten nothing since midnight in Exchange Court when he had taken his sandwiches, prepared for him earlier by Maria’s housekeeper. He was thirsty too. In earlier years, he might have finished his night-duty tour with a couple of pints of stout and perhaps a Tullamore or two in one of the early-morning houses licensed to serve drink to drovers, dealers and others whose livelihood would have them on the streets before the city was properly awake.
    The normal arrangements for refreshment and sustenance would not apply for the foreseeable future. He had a full agenda. He had to advise his superiors at Exchange Court of the details of the crime. He needed experienced detectives on the ground.
    Standard procedure would oblige him to open a ‘murder book.’ An investigation into a crime like this could take weeks or months. Police practice required that every jot of information, every witness interviewed and every statement taken be meticulously recorded in the murder book, checked and then cross-checked.
    Swallow reckoned that he had an hour before Dr Harry Lafeyre, the city medical examiner, would get to the scene along with the police photographic technician.
    He would have to eat at some point, and it was going to be a long day ahead. He knew too that at this stage of his investigation even the sight of mutilated bodies would not interfere with his appetite. That would come later, perhaps, when names had been put on them, when the lifeless corpses were no longer just nameless flesh and bone.
    He climbed aboard the Kilmainham side-car. ‘Breakfast it will be then, Stephen,’ he answered Doolan. ‘They say an army marches on its stomach, but I can tell you that in my experience so does a murder investigation.’
    The driver snapped the reins, drawing the horse from its feast of meadow-grass, and turned the car back towards the city.

TWO
    â€˜Pisspot’ Ces Downes died in the front bedroom of her house over-looking Francis Street, in Dublin’s Liberties, four days before the Queen’s Jubilee, on the third day of the heatwave. She breathed her last just after 8 o’clock in the evening, about the same time that Joe Swallow completed his initial report on the Chapelizod Gate murders and signed himself out of the detective office at Exchange Court.
    The news had spread during the week that the woman with a killer’s reputation who had spun a spider’s web of crime across the city for more than 20 years was on her deathbed. As quickly as the news percolated through the streets and the public houses and even the police stations, the question was being asked: What would happen when she was gone?
    There were differing versions of how ‘Pisspot’ Ces – Cecilia