Ghosts of the past come to mind – even when looking to the future, writes MICHAEL HARDING

‘THERE ARE a lot of ghosts in Mullingar,” an old man told me last week. We were standing on the banks of the Royal Canal.

We stood on the high ground between the railway track and the edge of the canal. The old man had a pallid face and long bloodless fingers. He was staring at some withered flowers that lay beside a small white cross, commemorating the death of a young woman in 1909.

“It happened 100 years ago,” he said, “but there are still people alive whose parents heard her scream.”

We walked further on, by the water’s edge, to a public seat beneath the big mottled leaves of a sycamore tree, and there he told me the story.

Twenty-five-year-old Mary Walker worked in the post office. One sunny Wednesday afternoon she went to her lodgings, as usual, for dinner, and afterwards, since it was a half-day, she went for a walk.

It was a lovely day, so she sat on the bank of the canal at the point where it slopes down to the railway line.

An hour later a stable boy, named Monaghan, was exercising a horse in a field opposite when he saw Mary being pursued by a man who forced her down the slope of the bank, until both of them disappeared from sight. And he recognised the man as Joseph Heffernan, who also worked in the post office.

There was no sign of Mary for the rest of the day, so a few people searched along the canal later in the evening, calling her name and beating the ditches. Her body was discovered at 11pm. Her throat had been slit from ear to ear.

When Joseph Heffernan returned to his lodgings that night, he was drunk. His landlady demanded to know where he had been. He blurted out something about having witnessed a terrible crime, down near the bridge.

She passed no remarks on this, but the next morning, when she asked him to fix a broom handle for her, he took from his pocket a penknife with which to do the job, and she noticed bloodstains on the blade.

She went to the police who told her that Heffernan matched the description given by the stable boy, and so he was arrested and charged. At his trail he pleaded insanity, but was executed at the hands of Henry Pierrepoint the following year.

On the morning of the execution, in Kilmainham Gaol, Heffernan attended Mass and received the last rites. When these were finished he had a short time to himself for reflection, and at five minutes to eight his cell door was opened and he was formally handed over to the executioner.

The hangman pinioned the wretch and led him to the scaffold.

Three hundred people gathered outside the prison gates. The morning was cold and foggy. The prison bell tolled eight bells. The law had taken its course. Or, as the stranger beside me whispered: “When the drop was opened, Heffernan got his comeuppance, at the end of a rope.”

We gazed into the canal. It began to rain.

On the other side of the water, traffic still roared up and down Patrick Street, and behind us, drills, pumps and other engines made a ferocious din in the various factories and workshops of Mullingar’s industrial zone.

I was thinking that if the same thing happened to anyone today, nobody would even hear the screams. But I said nothing.

“It’s a remarkable story,” I declared.

“Indeed it is,” he said, “and 100 years is a short time in a small town – but don’t say you heard it from me.”

And he walked away, with his collar up and his head down, to shield his face from the rain.

It’s true that in a small town a century can feel like a few days, but in my case three years feels like a century because of the extraordinary changes that have taken place in Mullingar since I arrived here three years ago.

The fizz of what used to look like Ireland’s Prague is gone and a new tightness in the air feels like the past coming back to haunt us.

But I shall remain on the lookout for noble men and women, with pure ideals and beautiful minds, as I patrol the midlands and confront the awfulness of middle Ireland in my trusty Pajero.