A June of Ordinary Murders Read Online Free Page B

Downes – had got her nickname. One was that she kept a porcelain pot brimming with sovereigns hidden in a secret room at the top of the three-storey house in Francis Street. Another was that when she drank porter she did so from a circular, two-handled vessel that looked as if it had been designed for sanitary purposes.
    Many years before, Joe Swallow had heard what he believed to be the more accurate account of it. His source was Stephen Doolan who was then working in plain clothes from the DMP station at College Street.
    Swallow and Doolan had spent a fruitless week trying to recover a haul of silver plate taken in broad daylight from a judge’s house on St Stephen’s Green. The word around the city was that ‘Pisspot’ Ces had already found a buyer for it in Manchester. Now they had taken two high stools in front of a pair of pints in Mulligan’s public house, behind the DMP station.
    The two policemen were in gloomy mood, anticipating the censure that would descend upon them from on high for their failure to restore His Lordship’s plate.
    â€˜She’s as hardened and vicious a criminal as you’ll meet, that one,’ Doolan said, as he squared up to his pint of Guinness’s porter. ‘And she has an eye for good silver.’
    He raised the tumbler to his lips and downed a third of his pint.
    â€˜That’s what she started with – silver. Did you know that?’
    He ran the back of his hand across his mouth, drawing the frothy trace of the porter off the bristles of his moustache. ‘As I heard it from one of the old-timers in College Street, she was only a young one at the time. She went to service in a big house in Merrion Square, I think it was. The housekeeper found a clutch of silver spoons hidden away under a petticoat. When she saw the set of spoons neatly wrapped away she told her she was calling the police.’
    He shook his head gravely.
    â€˜That was where she made the mistake – the housekeeper, that is. Ces Downes drew up a cast-iron chamber-pot from under the bed and battered her with it across the skull a dozen times. That woman never walked or talked properly afterwards.’
    Doolan raised his glass again.
    â€˜I heard that from one of the men that took Ces Downes to the Bridwell, still shouting that if she had a chance, she’d finish the ould bitch off. But you know, the extraordinary thing is that she was never charged for it. She could have been done at the very least for assault and battery, maybe even attempted murder. You won’t find any of it in the records at the Dublin Criminal Registry.’
    Whether the tale was true or not, it had gained acceptance in the world of Dublin crime. It became another thread in the mystery that was ‘Pisspot’ Ces Downes.
    Even in the closing days of her life, nobody in authority could have put their hands on any documentation to confirm where Ces was born or what her name had been before she married her late husband, Tommy ‘The Cutter’ Byrne.
    Searches by successive investigators over the years in the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages had yielded nothing. Trawls through the post office and the savings banks, facilitated by co-operative officials, found no trace of her supposed crime-funded fortune. There was nothing of use in her file in the Dublin Criminal Registry, the DMP’s vast repository of information held at Dublin Castle on those who came to their notice during the investigation of crime.
    A decade previously, after her husband had died of consumption, she paid cash down for what had once been the home of a prosperous wool-merchant on Francis Street.
    The once-elegant town house was within the hearing of the bells of the city’s two cathedrals: Christ Church and St Patrick’s. It became the headquarters of Ces Downes’s criminal operations. The fine reception rooms became dormitories for travelling criminals. The spacious kitchens and