I had been told by a constabulary officer what was coming, so that, unlike most persons in the court, I was not too startled to be able to observe every detail of the scene. Carey was talking to a brother ruffian named Brady quite unconcernedly, and Brady was actually smiling, when an officer of constabulary raised his finger and the informer stepped out of the dock, and two policemen in plain clothes moved to his side. Carey glanced back at his doomed accomplices, and muttered some words to Brady. I did not quite catch them, but I thought the words were, “It’s half an hour ahead of you that I am, Joe.”
Brady simply looked at his betrayer, whom it seems he had been anxious to betray. There was absolutely no expression upon his face. Some of the others of the same murderous gang seemed equally unaffected. One of them turned and spat on the floor. But upon the faces of at least two of the men there was a look of malignity that transformed them into fiends. It was the look that accompanies the stab of the assassin. Another of them gave a laugh, and said something to the man nearest to him; but the laugh was not responded to.
The youngest of the gang stared at one of the windows of the court-house in a way that showed me he had not been able to grasp the meaning of Carey’s removal from the dock.
In half-an-hour every expression worn by the faces of the men had changed. They all had a look that might almost have been regarded as jocular. There can be no doubt that when a man realises that he has been sentenced to death, his first feeling is one of relief. His suspense is over—so much is certain. He feels that—and that only—for an hour or so. I could see no change on the faces of these poor wretches whom the Mephistophelian fun of Fate had induced to call themselves Invincible, in order that no devilish element might be wanting in the tragedy of the Phoenix Park.
I do not suppose that many persons are acquainted with the secret history of the detection of the “Invincibles.” I think I am right in stating that it has never yet been made public. I am not at liberty to mention the source whence I derived my knowledge of some of the circumstances that led to the arrest of Carey, but there is no doubt in my mind as to the accuracy of my “information received” on this matter.
It may, perhaps, be remembered that, some months after the date of the murders, a strange advertisement appeared in almost every newspaper in Great Britain. It stated that if the man who had told another, on the afternoon of May 6th, 1882, that he had once enjoyed a day’s skating on the pond at the Viceregal Lodge, would communicate with the Chief of the Detective Department at Dublin Castle, he would be thanked. Now beyond the fact that May 6th was the date of the murders, and that they had taken place in the Phoenix Park, there was nothing in this advertisement to suggest that it had any bearing upon the shocking incident; still there was a general feeling that it had a very intimate connection with the efforts that the police were making to unravel the mystery of the outrage; and this impression was well founded.
I learned that the strangely-worded advertisement had been inserted in the newspapers at the instigation of a constabulary officer, who had, in many disguises, been endeavouring to find some clue to the assassins in Dublin. One evening he slouched into a public-house bespattered as a bricklayer, and took a seat in a box, facing a pint of stout. He had been in public-house after public-house every Saturday night for several weeks without obtaining the slightest suggestion as to the identity of the murderers, and he was becoming discouraged; but on this particular evening he had his reward, for he overheard a man in the next box telling some others, who were drinking with him, that Lord Spencer was not such a bad sort of man as might be supposed from the mere fact of his being Lord-Lieutenant. He (the narrator) had been told by a man in the Phoenix Park on the very evening of the murders that he (the man) had not been ashamed to cheer Lord Spencer on his arrival at Dublin that day, for when he had last been in Dublin he had allowed him to skate upon the pond in the Viceregal grounds.
The officer dared not stir from his place: he knew that if he were at all suspected of being a detective, his life would not be worth five minutes’ purchase. He could only hope to catch a glimpse of some of the party when they were leaving the place. He failed to do so, for some cause—I cannot remember what it was—nor could the barmaid give any satisfactory reply to his cautiously casual enquiries as to the names of any of the men who had occupied the box.
It was then that the advertisement was inserted in the various newspapers; and, after the lapse of some weeks, a man presented himself to the Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, saying that he believed the advertisement referred to him. The man seemed a respectable artisan, and his story was that one day during the last winter that Earl Spencer had been in Ireland, he (the man) had left his work in order to have a few hours’ skating on the ponds attached to the Zoological Gardens in the Phoenix Park, but on arriving at the ponds he found that the ice had been broken. “I was just going away,” the man said, “when a gentleman with a long beard spoke to me, and enquired if I had had a good skate. I told him that I was greatly disappointed, as the ice had all been broken, and I would lose my day’s pay. He took a card out of his pocket, and wrote something on it,” continued the man, “and then handed it to me, saying, ‘Give that to the porter at the Viceregal Lodge, and you’ll have the best day’s skating you have had in all your life.’ He said what was true: I handed in the card and told the porter that a tall gentleman with a beard had given it to me. ‘That was His Excellency himself,’ said the porter, as he brought me down to the pond, where, sure enough, I had such a day’s skating as I’ve never had before or since.”