Killing Down the Roman Line

Начало книги

The Corrigans are killed.

News of the town, hollered up fever pitch by a boy running down Galway Road this day, this cold February day, 1898. Shop owners stepped onto their verandas to see what all the bellowing was about, women scraped the frost from parlour windows to see the lad running through the snow. Some of them had sniffed the bad business during the night. The smell of smoke, rich and angry, drifting through the town to find them in their beds. A few had even seen the glow of it, hazing over the treeline but none had gone to find its source. Closing the drapes and pulling the blankets tighter, the sign of the cross drawn quickly over brow and shoulders and no more.

The Corrigans are killed.

The boy screaming the news was young Tommy Purtell, a neighbour of the killed family. Hollering and carrying on all the way down the frozen road called the Roman Line, six miles to the constable’s cottage on Christie Street. The boy banged on the door, rattling the slat wood in its frame but no one answered his call. It was Sunday morning and the peace officer, Constable James Carroll, was known to sleep late on the Sabbath, having spent most of the night keeping the peace of a Saturday night. It was tiring work. When the brawlers and the braggarts refused to settle down, a hard crack of the truncheon was required to restore order and swinging that mace would exhaust a man. So the boy went on, screaming his news to the frozen streets.

Читать дальше →