The City of Shadows. Michael Russell

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СКАЧАТЬ who was there. But if there was concern beneath that puzzled look it was well hidden. There was already a half smile on his face, even as Detective Sergeant Gillespie started to walk towards him. He knew what the two men were. He had absorbed that information and accepted it. He was not a man who bothered about the inevitable. He didn’t move as the detective approached him; instead his smile broadened. Stefan had only seen Keller at a distance before, going in and out of the house. He was always well dressed; today was no exception. Even though he was in shirtsleeves, the shirt was gleaming white; the yellow bow tie was perfectly tied; the braces had a floral pattern that was bright, almost loud, yet expensively tasteful; the suit trousers had knife-sharp creases; and his black shoes were spotlessly clean. By now Keller’s benign smile was irritating the detective. It was altogether too pleasant to be anything other than extremely unpleasant. Wherever it came from the effect was to make him want to wipe the smile off the man’s face with his fist. But even as that thought flashed through his mind he had an unsettling picture of Keller getting up from the floor and wiping the blood from his mouth, with the smile still there, broader and more unctuous than ever.

      ‘Hugo Keller,’ said Stefan flatly.

      ‘Doctor Keller.’ The German accent was stronger than he had expected. But he knew German accents. Austria, probably Vienna.

      ‘It’s Mr Keller I think.’

      ‘My doctorate is from the University of Graz. You may not know it, but it’s the second oldest university in Austria. Doctor Keller is correct.’

      ‘In Wien hat jeder streunende Hund ein Doktorat, aber sie sind noch immer Hunde, nicht Ärzte, Herr Keller.’ He stressed ‘Herr’. It was true. In Vienna every dog in the streets had a doctorate in something. They were still dogs, not doctors. The smile wavered on Keller’s lips. This wasn’t quite the Dublin detective he had anticipated. Contempt might not be so wise.

      ‘I am Detective Sergeant Gillespie. I will be conducting a search of your premises. I believe you have instruments here that have been used to procure miscarriages, contrary to Section 58 of the Offences against the Persons Act, and I believe you are, even now, engaged in procuring a miscarriage for a woman. You will be taken into custody, Mr Keller.’

      ‘Naturally, Sergeant. I’ll get my jacket.’

      He turned back into the room. Stefan followed. He passed an open door on his right, a small office full of books and files. He paused, looking in, registering it. The nurse had composed herself now. She brushed back her hair and walked past him into the office. Unlike her employer the look on her face was familiar; it was fear. He watched her as she sat at the desk.

      ‘Please don’t try to leave,’ he said quietly.

      ‘Why should I?’ Despite the fear, this was her territory.

      He carried on into the back drawing room of the house. It was a startling change after the dark corridor, with its stained wallpaper and blackened ceiling. The room was bright and clean and looked as if it had been transported there directly from an expensive private clinic. But while Stefan took this in his attention was fixed on the dark-haired woman he had watched enter the house. She stood in the window, framed by the sunlight that had momentarily broken through the grey December clouds. It shone through her hair in a gauze-like haze. For a second the startling brightness made him blink. And then it was gone. She was looking straight at him. Now, more closely, he saw there was indeed neither fear nor shame in her dark eyes. There was anger, and it seemed to be directed at him.

      ‘If you’d wait in the hall, Mr Keller.’ He didn’t look round.

      ‘I’m sorry, my dear.’ Keller smiled a slightly different smile at the woman. It was kinder and more reassuring than the one he had for Garda sergeants. He picked up his jacket from the back of a chair and pulled it on. ‘I don’t know if you heard any of that, outside in the hall. This gentleman is a policeman, a detective. My advice would be to say nothing, but that’s entirely up to you of course. You need offer no explanation for why you are in this room, as he well knows.’ He walked to the door. There was a mirror on the wall and he stopped to straighten his bow tie. Stefan Gillespie hardly noticed him go out. His eyes were still on the woman at the window.

      ‘Can you tell me who you are, Miss?’

      She shook her head, but only in irritable and frustrated disbelief.

      ‘You couldn’t have done this on another day, could you?’

      He just looked. Nothing at all about this woman was right.

      ‘How long has this man been doing this, procuring miscarriages, whatever it is you call it? How many years? It’s just what I needed, you and your great policeman’s boots stomping in before I’d even got started!’

      ‘I need your name. I’m sure you know why I’m here.’

      The woman gazed at him and shook her head again. All at once the anger was gone. He saw something else in her eyes now. It was a mixture of contempt and suspicion. She looked at him as if he was the one in the wrong.

      ‘No, I don’t know why you’re here. I think I’ll reserve my judgement on that, Sergeant. In the meantime I shall take Mr Keller’s advice about keeping my mouth shut. You may be his best friend. So I shall say nothing.’

      *

      Pearse Street Garda station was the main police station for the South City, built for the old Dublin Metropolitan Police in 1915, the year before Padraig Pearse was executed after the Easter Rising, when the road was still Great Brunswick Street. It took up the corner of Townsend Street, looking towards Trinity College, a grey, austere building that echoed the Scottish-castle style of architecture popular with insurance companies, all chiselled stone and mullioned windows. The DMP was only a memory now, except for two small corbels supporting the arch over the main entrance; the sour faces of a DMP officer and a helmeted constable still looked down in disapproval. As stations went it wasn’t a bad place to work. The offices upstairs were brighter and cleaner than most of Dublin’s Garda stations, but downstairs the cells smelt like they always smelt – of stale sweat and urine and tobacco.

      Stefan Gillespie sat in a room on the ground floor, close enough to the stairs for the odour of the cells to hover in the air. A bare table separated him from the dark-haired woman. The room was bare too, lit by a naked bulb. There was a window high in one wall, no more than a foot square, the glass painted over with the remains of what once must have been whitewash. She had still given him no information and no explanation. She denied nothing, admitted nothing, said nothing. He didn’t even know her name. She returned his gaze with quiet self-assurance. He was the one who kept looking away to scribble something he didn’t need to scribble on the sheet of white paper in front of him. She was beginning to make him feel she was the one running this.

      ‘You’re from Dublin, thereabouts anyway. The leafier parts I’d say.’

      She didn’t answer.

      ‘You’ve clearly been out of the country though.’

      ‘An accent and a suntan, I can see you’re nobody’s fool.’

      She didn’t need to smile to make him feel foolish.

      ‘Do you realise how much trouble you’re in?’

      ‘As a matter of fact I don’t.’

      ‘I can see you’re an intelligent woman. You’re not what I expected.’

      He СКАЧАТЬ