The Informer

I

It was three minutes to six o’clock in the evening of the fifteenth of March 192‒.

Francis Joseph McPhillip ran up the concrete steps leading to the glass-panelled swing door that acted as street entrance to the Dunboy Lodging House. The House, as it was called in Dublin, among criminal and pauperized circles, was a grey concrete building of four stories. It stood on the left-hand side of a wide windswept asphalt lane off B—— Road on the south side of the city. A maze of slum streets surrounded it. An indefinable smell of human beings living in a congested area filled the air around it. From the building itself, a smell of food and of floors being scrubbed with soap and hot water emanated.

A drizzling rain was falling from a black bulging sky. Now and again a flock of hailstones, driven by a sudden gust of querulous wind, clattered down the lane, falling in little dancing groups on the hard, perspiring asphalt.

McPhillip ran up the four steps and peered into the hall hurriedly through the glass door. He put his face so close to the glass that his excited breath caused an immediate blur of vapour on the frozen pane. Then he turned about. He crouched against the angle of the doorway and peered around the corner of the wall, up the lane through which he had just come. He wanted to find out whether anybody was following him. He was a murderer.

He had killed the secretary of the local branch of the Farmers’ Union during the farm labourers’ strike at M—— in the previous October. Since then he had been hiding out in the mountains with a group of men who were evading arrest, brigands, criminals and political refugees. He had just come into Dublin half an hour previously on a goods train. The conductor of the train was a member of the Revolutionary Organization, to which McPhillip himself had belonged when he shot the Farmers’ Union Secretary.