The City of Strangers (49 page)

Stefan Gillespie leaned across the back seat of the Humber and pulled the car door shut. Dessie started the engine and drove forward to turn the car round in front of the King’s Inns gates.

‘She’s all right,’ said Dessie MacMahon as they drove away.

‘Who?’

‘The one who shot your man in the hand. I like that in a woman.’

The night before Aidan McCarthy’s execution, Thomas Pierrepoint, the English hangman, watched him through a secret window in the condemned cell at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, in order to finalise his calculations. Although the Home Office provided a table that matched height and weight to the length of the noose required for an efficient hanging, the final judgement was the hangman’s own; hanging was an intimate business and in the last seconds, when the hood was put over the head, there were only two people involved, the hangman and the to-be-hanged. Other judgements had, of course, already been made, and if there was another to come after the drop, well, that was in a different jurisdiction altogether.

As Pierrepoint watched him, McCarthy was kneeling at the side of the bed praying.

He prayed for the people he loved. For his wife and the man he had always looked on as his son. He prayed for the brother his silence had sentenced to death in another execution all those years ago on a stormy night outside Castleberehaven. He prayed for his country and the struggle for freedom that he was dying for. He thought of the places he loved. He remembered the sound of the sea; the breath of the cattle in the cold morning air; the rain on the Caha Mountains. He prayed for the places he loved too. He prayed for the man who had met a brutal death in a strange city because of the lies he had told, and because of the lies other people had made out of those lies, and because of what had been left inside a small boy’s heart seventeen years earlier; but it would be an exaggeration to say that the life of a soldier of the Free State, even then, warranted very much praying.

He didn’t pray for the five people who had died outside the jewellery shop in Coventry’s Broadgate: a man of eighty-one, a man of fifty, a man of thirty-three, a woman of twenty-one, a boy of fifteen. He had heard their names many times in the course of the trial, but he didn’t think of them now. He felt no remorse for what he had done. A war was being fought, and wars had victims; there had been enough Irish victims after all. How many of their names were on English lips?

He got up from his prayers and moved to the table where a plate of steak and roast potatoes and cabbage was waiting for him. There was a glass of Guinness. He had no particular love of stout; he was no great drinker; but he drank it out of politeness to the warder. And he was calm enough. What was happening now was what had to happen. He had known that from the moment he was arrested. And he had thought about it in the bare, damp room in Hammersmith, lying awake at night, listening to the rumble of the Underground. He would die for Ireland, and in doing that maybe someone else, someone younger, wouldn’t have to die. In dying he would pay his debt too, and in paying it, finally, the past would be purged.

Aidan McCarthy had left Ireland for England the day Stefan Gillespie and Gearóid de Paor returned to Dublin. He had not waited for goodbyes; he would not see the faces of the people he loved changed in the way they saw him forever. He had simply walked away with enough money to take the boat from Cobh to England.

In London he had gone to Hammersmith, for no special reason other than that there were Irish people there, but not too many. He called himself David Haigh. He had got a job on a building site and, after sleeping rough for two nights, a room in Cambridge Grove, overlooking the District Line; he worked hard and kept himself to himself.

The first night in Cambridge Grove he had walked down to the Thames; he had a drink at the Blue Anchor and drank it outside, looking at Hammersmith Bridge.

The IRA’s attempt to blow it up was in Aidan McCarthy’s mind that night. It wasn’t difficult, over a period of months, for him to find his way to people who knew people in the IRA in London, and to make it clear that he was willing to work for the cause. He had soon sensed who he should talk to, and the habit of silence that characterised him recommended him. Since the bombing campaign had started in January the bombs had continued to go off, regularly and ineffectually; the IRA was now an illegal organisation in Ireland as well as Britain; more and more IRA men had been imprisoned. Volunteers were thin on the ground now, and because of that David Haigh was trusted sooner than he might have been. He moved very quickly from carrying messages across London to carrying explosives.

On 21 August he had taken a train to Coventry to visit James Richards, an IRA man lodging with an Irish family in Clara Street, to instruct him to prepare a bomb. The bomb would be collected by another IRA man and planted in the city. McCarthy had returned to Hammersmith the next day to supply explosives for three bombs destined for Scotland Yard, Westminster Abbey and the Bank of England. The bombers were caught before the bombs could be planted, but two days later, in Coventry, James Richards’ bomb went off outside Astley’s jewellery shop in Broadgate. Five passers-by died. The man who left the bomb was never identified, but James Richards was arrested immediately; Aidan McCarthy, as David Haigh, was already in custody in London. Now he was to hang.

A man can only give what he has, but as he faced death Aidan McCarthy found more than he knew he had. He had said little during the trial; he had answered questions where there was an answer he chose to give, but he said nothing that provided information, nothing that incriminated anyone. Only at the end did he say anything about himself.

‘My lord, before you pass sentence of death on me, I wish to thank sincerely the gentlemen who have defended me. I wish to state that what I have done I have done for a just cause. As a soldier of the Irish Republican Army I am not afraid to die. God bless Ireland and God bless the men who have fought and died for her cause.’

He died under the name he had called himself in London, David Haigh. He made no attempt to communicate with his family in Béarra. There was no consolation to be offered to them and he didn’t expect his death to give any; but he felt he had done his duty at the highest level, and in doing so he had tried to pay the debt he owed his brother; if there was forgiveness, please God, he had earned it. He died well for what he believed in; the five people in Coventry who had also died for what he believed didn’t; but as tens of millions prepared to die all over the world, well and not so well, for what others believed, none of it mattered very much.

Many years later, Aidan McCarthy’s body would be transferred from the grounds of Winson Green to Ireland for burial. His coffin would be draped in the Irish tricolour, just as Captain John Cavendish’s had been, and just as, alongside the Stars and Stripes, Captain Aaron Phelan’s had been.

Yet when Aidan McCarthy walked the cold stone corridor at Winson Green to meet Thomas Pierrepoint, his final thoughts were not as easy as he had hoped they might be. A priest walked beside him; his last confession was said; he had received his last Eucharist and he carried its promise of salvation. And he wanted to believe it, yet the words that came to him, not the priest’s words but words suddenly there in his head, were not words of absolution. ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones … it were better for him that a millstone were hung round his neck and he were drowned at the bottom of the sea.’

As the black hood went over his head, the sound he heard was a sound from that morning, seventeen years ago on Pallas Strand, somehow there with him now, at the end; it was the angry screaming of the gulls. And it wasn’t the eyeless face of his brother that he saw, buried in sand almost to the shoulders; it was the face of the small boy staring at it.

*

Garda Sergeant Stefan Gillespie was eating breakfast in the otherwise empty dining room of Annie O’Neill’s Private Hotel in Westland Row, on the morning of 3
September. It was late, already after eleven o’clock, but the events of the previous night meant that he had slept in; not that he had slept very much in the end. Kate and Niamh would have left the convent now; Kate was going to take her sister to an old friend’s in Kildare, somewhere she could stay for a while and do nothing and say nothing to anybody. Dominic Carroll would be on his way to Foynes to take the flying boat to New York, with whatever messages he had brought back from Berlin. As Stefan ate there was music on the radio, not loud enough to listen to but too loud to ignore; he found himself humming John Ryan’s polka.

Suddenly Annie appeared, bustling and businesslike in a way that was quite unlike her; with her was Superintendent Gregory. As senior officers didn’t stay at Annie’s, she was always dismissive of them; she had known them before they were jumped up and full of shite and she usually knew things about them they weren’t comfortable with. Terry Gregory was unusually polite as he sat down; there were things she knew about him in his younger days. He made a laboured joke about the grand old times and said he’d love a cup of tea; sure, didn’t he know no one made tea like Annie after all? It was true enough, although it wasn’t exactly the way he remembered it. As he would shortly recall, Annie made some of the worst tea in Dublin.

‘She gives me the shivers,’ he said, taking out a cigarette. ‘She’s got something on all of us, even Ned Broy. I wish I had her in Special Branch.’

He lit the cigarette and glanced down at the newspaper on the table.

‘Will it be war today, then?’

‘I can’t see why not.’

‘You wouldn’t think so walking through Dublin, Sergeant.’

‘Well, they keep telling us it won’t be our war,’ shrugged Stefan.

He kept eating, not really noticing what he was eating now, waiting for Gregory to tell him why he was there. He couldn’t believe he knew anything about the previous night; he certainly wouldn’t have got anything from Dessie MacMahon. But the Special Branch had informants in the IRA. It wasn’t impossible he knew. However Stefan wasn’t going to play the game. He had nothing to say to anybody about Niamh Carroll now. Whatever else happened, he wasn’t going to hand her back to Special Branch for questioning in Dublin Castle. There was nothing more she could tell anyone anyway. She had more than earned the right to be left alone.

‘I was talking to Ned Broy about you,’ said Gregory cautiously.

‘I see,’ replied Stefan without looking up. He wasn’t convinced the superintendent didn’t know something, or that he wasn’t being questioned.

The next words, however, were no species of question.

‘You start in Special Branch next week. You’ll be working for me.’

When the surprise had subsided Stefan shook his head.

‘I’m happy enough where I am, sir.’

‘I’m not here to ask you how happy you are, Gillespie.’

‘The reason I’m in Baltinglass –’

‘I’m not interested in your family problems either,’ snapped the superintendent. ‘Some of it’s going to be our war too. It’s not a request.’

‘I have responsibilities –’

‘You’ll have to sort that out yourself. The Commissioner tells me I need you. And he’s probably right. I’ve got a couple of German speakers, and if I was going on holiday with them they’d be great boys for ordering beer and sausage. I need someone who can not only tell me the difference between the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichführers-SS, but can actually say it.’

Stefan noted that Terry Gregory had no trouble saying it.

‘Besides, you’ve got a nose for it, Sergeant, maybe it’s all those relations in Germany you don’t see any more.’

Stefan was well aware that the superintendent was letting him know, as he had before once, exactly how much he knew about him.

‘And people like you, Sergeant, you know that, people who don’t like me very much at all. I think you’ll be very useful.’

‘What does that mean, sir?’ asked Stefan.

‘You know a lot,’ Gregory continued, ‘about all sorts of things. From German spies in Ireland to what Captain Cavendish had on the IRA in New York. So the first thing you’re going to do is fill in some gaps in my education. We’re all going to be working with Military Intelligence now, like we’re old pals. I don’t need to tell you I’ve got too many ex-IRA men to make it easy for G2 to trust us, and G2’s got too many anti-Treaty soldiers with long memories. But it seems you feature very low on the list of policemen Commandant de Paor doesn’t trust, unlike most of Special Branch. That’s how the Commissioner put it. I’d put it like this. You tell me everything. You’re working for me. And don’t you ever fucking forget it.’

He smiled, but there was nothing idle about those last words. He looked at his watch. He got up and walked to the radio. He turned the dial. There were whines and crackles as ‘The Boys of Bluehill’ turned into distorted, isolated words in Irish, German, French. Then there was an English voice. It was Neville Chamberlain’s, the British Prime Minister.

‘… unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany …’

Gregory retuned the dial to Radio Éireann; the sound of applause.

‘From the horse’s mouth. Right so, Dublin Castle, Monday week.’

On the radio the band was playing ‘The Maid behind the Bar’.

The superintendent headed for the door.

‘And by the way, you’re an inspector now. About fecking time.’

Stefan sat back in his chair.

‘I’ll want my own sergeant, sir.’

Terry Gregory turned round.

‘Not one of my two-faced lying hacks you mean?’

Detective Inspector Gillespie smiled; it was exactly what he meant.

‘Well, that fat eejit Dessie MacMahon’s no use to me.’

*

When Stefan Gillespie arrived home from Dublin, the news of war was already there, and he left his own news until later. He needed to tell his mother and father before he talked to Tom. For a time it was going to be like it had been once before. He would have to live in Dublin and come home when he could on weekends and days off. It would have to work, however little anyone liked it; the farm was still the right place for Tom. Stefan still wanted it to be a home for both of them, even if he could not be there all the time.