The City of Strangers. Michael Russell

to be better ways to do that. No, this was where she was killed and there was a lot of blood. Someone tried to clean it up. There’s soap mixed with the blood. The story is he put the fire on to dry the floor, then left. But as he never came back –’

      Stefan was still looking down at the floor.

      ‘What happened to the carpet?’

      ‘The State Pathologist took some of the rugs and the bedclothes, but the carpet had gone already. Your man must have had it. It would have been soaked looking at what’s round the room. Maybe he brought it with him. Maybe he wrapped the body in it. There’s not a lot of blood in the car. She was on the back seat, so she must have been covered in something anyway.’

      ‘So with all this blood – she was stabbed? Is there a weapon?’

      ‘I’ll show you where the axe was. We’ll go out the back way.’

      The garden that led down to the mews at the back of the house in Herbert Place was neatly kept, but it was bare and grey. Squares of grass and small, dark rhododendrons; tightly clipped bushes took up the flower beds. When the spring came there would be few enough flowers to give colour. Dessie pointed out several chalk-marked stains on the stone paved path that led to the two-storey mews; a little more blood to mark where the body had been half-dragged and half-carried from the house.

      They walked through a door into the gutted stables that had once housed the family’s horses, and now smelt of the leaked engine oil that stained the stone floor. There were a couple of bicycles, some garden tools, a workbench full of spanners and wrenches, rusty and cobwebbed. Against one wall was a pile of cut turf, with sticks for the fires stacked beside it. Dessie stood by the turf and kicked at it.

      ‘There was a small hatchet here, under a pile of turf. There’s a gardener comes in now and again. He uses it for splitting wood for a bit of kindling. So it was kept in the garage. It had a good wash but there was still blood on it. They think it was maybe hot water, so instead of the blood running away it coagulated. They reckon it must be what killed her though.’

      He walked across the empty garage to the double doors.

      ‘Mrs Harris’s car was kept in here. So he must have brought the body in, then shoved her on to the back seat. Bit tight in a Baby Austin. Timings aren’t very clear. Only one sighting of the car. It was probably dark when he left.’

      Detective Sergeant MacMahon opened one of the doors.

      ‘Evening, night?’ asked Stefan as they walked out into the lane that ran behind Herbert Place. It was almost empty, as it must have been then.

      ‘Not late. Seven, maybe eight o’clock.’

      Two boys were walking slowly along the lane towards Mount Street. Stefan Gillespie watched them for a moment as Dessie lit another cigarette. They were ten or eleven, one of them dragging a cart behind him, the base of an old pram, stacked with broken boxes and cardboard.

      He recognised the boys’ slow, patient walk from the years he had spent tramping the streets of Dublin as a guard. There were thousands of children just like them. He recognised the odd combination of resignation and anticipation in the way they moved, their eyes alert for any piece of wood, anything that would burn, anything that would keep a fire going in the tenement where there was never any money for coal or turf, or anything else. He recognised the grey clothes drained of any colour they might once have had, too big on one boy, too small on the other, that had been handed down more times than anyone could remember. He knew the damp, dark, rotten, infested houses that Éamon de Valera’s new Ireland had still not touched, and he knew the cold, crowded room in one of those houses that the boys would live in.

      Suddenly one of them darted across the lane with a shout to grab the prize of half of an orange box. They were laughing. And after the blood and the well-heeled claustrophobia of the house where Leticia Harris had been hacked to death, their laughter was a reassuring sound. Stefan smiled, turning back to Dessie.

      ‘So where is she?’

      Sergeant MacMahon shrugged, drawing on his Sweet Afton.

      ‘We’ve got a sweepstake going at the Castle. They reckon it was high tide when the old lady was thrown in the sea. My money’s on Scotland.’

       4. Corbawn Lane

      Corbawn Lane was a long, straight road that led from the village of Shankill to the sea. There were dark hedges and closely planted trees on both sides of the lane; the trees reached up and arched across the road almost the whole length, sometimes meeting in the middle. Even with the trees not yet in leaf, the straight line of the lane created the effect of a tunnel out of the skeleton branches.

      Eight miles south of Dublin, Shankill was a place of small farms and country houses, just beyond the reach of the city’s slowly spreading suburbia. Around the village clusters of new bungalows payed homage to a still very English idea of what it was to live near the sea, but they were also a statement that the city had its eye on Shankill’s fields and estates. Yet Corbawn Lane was still a long way from Dublin. Every so often a break in one of the long hedges announced that somewhere among the trees there was a big house: Dorney Court, Lisnalurg, Clarebeg, then across the bridge over the railway, Llanmawr, Eaton Brae, and then, where the lane finally ended, hard against the sea and the small cliff beyond, the turning to the right, past the last lodge, into the last house called Clifton.

      Several cars were parked in front of the house, among them the Austin that Dessie MacMahon had driven down from Herbert Place.

      It was a grey house; the grey stucco beneath the grey-black roof was grubbily spotted with algae and lichen in various shades of grey, and at the corners of the house it was starting to crumble away. The house itself was empty; it had been empty for a long time. The big downstairs windows that looked out over the garden to the sea were covered by boards that had themselves become grey and stained over the years; upstairs the curtains were closed.

      The gardens that led across the lawn to a row of trees and the sea were controlled rather than cared for; someone came to cut the grass and stop the borders going wild but that was all.

      Stefan Gillespie and Dessie MacMahon stood at the far side of the garden where a thick hedge separated it from the low cliffs and the sea beyond. The hedge was smashed and broken; the grass around it was muddy and churned; there were the deep ruts of car tyres that had been spinning and spinning aimlessly there.

      ‘I told you about the Baby Austin Mrs Harris drove. She’d only had it three months. It was her pride and joy apparently. She seems to have spent most of those three months driving it around Dublin. And this is where they found it, jammed into the hedge right here. The night she disappeared a friend of hers saw the car coming out of Herbert Place and turning on to Baggot Street. The woman thinks it was Owen Harris who was driving it.’

      ‘So he brought it here? With the body in the back?’ said Stefan.

      ‘It’s hard to see it any other way. He had to get rid of it. He must have decided the sea was his best bet. It wasn’t such a daft idea either. She hasn’t been found. Whether he was trying to get the car into the sea as well –’

      They both looked up for a moment. There was the drone of an aircraft overhead. A small plane was following the coast, northwards towards Dublin. Across the garden hedge where the cliff dropped down to the beach below, uniformed guards were walking along at the water’s edge, their eyes fixed on the sand and rock; offshore there were two small boats. The beach had been searched and re-searched, but every day it was searched again with the tides in case the sea gave anything up.

      ‘We’re up and down the whole east coast,’ said Dessie, ‘from Wexford right up to the North. They’re looking in Wales, Scotland, the Lancashire coast. Not a sign of her.’

      ‘It’s going to be hard work keeping all that quiet, isn’t it?’

      ‘It’s a missing woman,