Long Time Coming (32 page)

‘That depends,’ he teased her.

‘On what, pray?’

‘Whether you think you’re likely to fall in with … the wrong crowd … for lack of guidance from a man of the world.’

‘And if I were?’

‘Then I should consider it a point of honour to … come to your rescue.’

‘I may need rescuing quite often.’

‘You may indeed.’ He smiled at her. ‘But I’m willing to accept the responsibility.’

They parted after lunch at a restaurant Isolde knew. Back at the
Shelbourne Swan prescribed for himself a doze and a session with the resident masseur in preparation for his tiresome duties of the evening. Shortly after six o’clock, he set off. He made his way across St Stephen’s Green blithely unconcerned as to whether Special Branch were tailing him or not, for the simple reason that anyone following him was bound to do so on foot and would be left helpless by his departure on the other side of the park in a fast-moving car.

The driver was silent and expressionless. Linley, sitting next to him in the front seat, turned to greet Swan with a smile as they sped south along Harcourt Street.

‘I think we happen to be going your way, Cygnet, so sit back and relax. Henchy’s money is in there.’ He pointed to the Gladstone bag on the floor behind the driver’s seat.

‘I can’t help noticing we seem to be heading in the wrong direction. Westland Row is north.’

‘A precautionary detour, nothing more. Willis knows what he’s doing.’

‘Lucky man.’ Swan hoisted the bag up on to the seat beside him and opened it. Beneath a folded newspaper, he found the promised wad of banknotes. ‘Rather like Lorcan P. Henchy.’

‘It’s not always the good and godly who are rewarded in this life, I’m afraid. Just put the wretched fellow on that boat and we can forget all about him. Then your work for the legation will be done. Well, apart from propping up our middle order batting, of course. You will turn out tomorrow, won’t you?’

‘Not if I’m stuck down at number seven and never allowed to bowl.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘So I should hope. I’d be disappointed if my labours on your behalf went unrewarded.’

‘Perish the thought, Cygnet. Perish the thought.’

The precautionary detour delivered Swan to Westland Row station in ample time for the seven o’clock train to Dun Laoghaire. ‘See
you later,’ was Linley’s parting cry as the car pulled away, a reference to their agreement to meet for a nightcap at the Shelbourne.

Swan went into the station lavatory, shut himself in a cubicle and transferred fifty pounds from the Gladstone bag to an envelope, which he put in his pocket. Then he strolled back out and boarded the waiting train.

The connection with the eight o’clock ferry meant it was three quarters full when it left and heavily loaded with luggage. Most of the passengers looked glum, the drizzly, overcast weather doing nothing for any voyager’s spirits. Swan lit a cigarette and consoled himself with the thought that he at least would not be leaving dry land. The man opposite him pulled his hat well down over his eyes and fell instantly asleep. The train steamed lethargically on its way.

At each stop, Swan lowered the window and peered out to see if Henchy was on the platform. Finally, at Blackrock station, there he was, portmanteau in hand, threadbare Inverness overcoat draped around him. Swan held the door open for him and he clambered aboard, taking the seat next to the sleeper under the hat.

‘I wondered if you’d make it,’ Swan remarked.

‘I wondered that myself about you,’ said Henchy with an ironic smile. ‘Got much luggage?’

‘Just this.’ Swan pointed to the Gladstone bag between his feet.

‘I like to travel light myself.’

‘Are you a good sailor?’

‘As good as I am anything else.’

‘Cigarette?’

‘Why, thank you.’

Swan’s striking of a match roused the sleeping man where no number of jolts, whistles and shouts had. He blinked and looked round at Henchy. ‘Good Lord, where are we?’

‘Just left Blackrock.’

‘Then I’ve not missed Seapoint. That’s lucky. I can’t tell you how often I overrun.’ He was pasty-faced and shabbily suited. An
overworked clerk of some sort, Swan surmised, feeling sorry for him and also faintly scornful. Swan was confident he would never be reduced to such an existence.

The train had already begun to slow as it approached Seapoint station. The man gathered himself together. He appeared to have no luggage. Whatever work he did, he was at least taking none of it home. As the train came to a halt, he eased the door open and stepped out. Swan gazed past him at the calm grey expanse of Dublin Bay, stretching away beyond the sea wall next to the platform.

‘Goodbye,’ said the man, turning back to face them.

There was a loud crack. Swan jumped in surprise, thinking the man had broken something in the door as he slammed it shut. But the door, he suddenly realized, was still open. Henchy uttered a strange, gurgling cry and slumped down in his seat. There was blood on his coat and shirt, spreading like spilt wine. His face was contorted in pain and shock.

Swan looked from Henchy towards the door. The man had a revolver in his hand and was staring grimly at him. Swan saw the barrel of the gun move to point in his direction. There was no doubt in his mind what was about to happen.

But in that instant the train started forward with a lurch, swinging the door against the gunman just as he took aim. There was another loud crack, a ping as the bullet missed Swan and ricocheted off the luggage rack, a scream from behind him, a confusion of shouts. Swan grabbed the Gladstone bag and lashed out with it, striking the gunman in the face. The man toppled backwards. A whistle blew stridently. ‘Watch out there,’ someone bellowed. The train continued to move. And the gunman moved with it, his foot trapped between the step and the platform edge. The revolver was knocked from his grasp. He slipped further down into the gap and let out a shriek. There were more whistle blasts and cries of alarm.

Seeing his chance, Swan sprang out of the carriage. He moved to where the revolver had fallen and picked it up. Looking back, he saw the train continuing to drag the gunman along even as it began
to slow. He was trapped somewhere around his thigh. His shrieks had become a yowl of agony. The guard was rushing towards him, along with several passengers who had just got off.

But Swan turned away. He opened the bag, dropped the revolver inside, clipped it shut and hurried towards the footbridge.

‘I suppose the mystery of my father’s death was one of the reasons I became a journalist,’ said Moira Henchy. ‘You always hope you can get to the bottom of a story, though you seldom do. I’ve prayed that one day I may get to the bottom of his. I can only remember him as this remote, awkward, shadowy figure, standing in the doorway of our cottage in Cork, or at the front gate, looking towards me. Never inside, never at home. Always … leaving.

‘My mother told me he was dead, of course, but years passed before she admitted he’d been murdered. She didn’t know – or want to know – why. It was the kind of scandalous end she’d expected of him. Probably related to unpaid gambling debts. I was determined to find out as much as I could, so I looked up the newspaper reports of how it had happened.

‘At Seapoint railway station, south of Dublin, at about seven twenty on the evening of Friday the fifth of July, 1940, my father, Lorcan Parnell Henchy, was shot dead by a man leaning in through the doorway of the train he was on. Witnesses disagreed about whether the killer had just got off the train or was waiting for it to arrive. He tried to shoot another man, who was apparently travelling with my father, but missed. I’m certain that man was your uncle Eldritch Swan, who struck the killer with his bag, causing him to fall and become trapped between the platform edge and the train as it started moving. The main artery in his leg was severed before the train came to a
halt and he bled to death at the scene. He was never identified.

‘Eldritch had vanished by the time the police and ambulance arrived. No one had noticed him leave the station amidst the general confusion. The gun had also vanished. I assume he took it. He had good reason to be in fear of his life, after all.’

‘How can you be sure it was him?’ I asked, though I didn’t for a moment doubt it.

‘My chance to make further enquiries came when I moved to Dublin as a student. I checked the last address we had for my father: thirty-one Merrion Street. Mrs Kilfeather, the old lady who owned the house, told me he’d moved out of his flat a couple of weeks before his death. She also mentioned that the new tenant, an English elocution teacher called Eldritch Swan, had been arrested there the day after my father’s murder. Oddly, she didn’t know why. “But he must have been up to no good” was how she put it. I couldn’t find anything in the papers about this man, Swan, but there was a court record of his trial later that month on charges under the Offences Against the State Act. It was held in camera and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Now, that was altogether strange. The Offences Against the State Act was designed for use against the IRA. They always acknowledge their own. But they clearly knew nothing about Eldritch Swan. Neither did anyone else.

‘I didn’t have much to go on. In my father’s pocket the police found a single ticket from Blackrock, the station before Seapoint, to Dun Laoghaire, but he had a large bag with him, containing most of his worldly possessions, including his passport, which suggested he was planning to go far further than Dun Laoghaire. England would be my guess, with or without Eldritch. Both men were supposed to be killed, but one got away, only to be arrested the following day. Why? What had they done? What did they know?

‘I worked as a reporter for the local paper in Cork after university and it wasn’t until I got a job in Dublin a few years later that I was able to go back into the case. I cajoled the Justice Department into telling me which prison Eldritch was being held in: Portlaoise. I applied for permission to visit him. It was refused.
I went to see the barrister listed as representing him at his trial. He’d retired and refused to speak to me. But his office suggested I contact the solicitor who’d brought the case to them: Ardal Quilligan. He wouldn’t tell me anything either. He claimed the police had never divulged to him exactly what Eldritch was supposed to have done.

‘Then my editor called me in and said he’d been officially warned off by the Justice Department. He wasn’t best pleased, since he didn’t have a clue what I’d been doing. I agreed to drop it. I didn’t, of course, not completely. But there wasn’t much more I could do anyway. I found out Ardal Quilligan’s brother, Desmond, had been an IRA activist, but he’d renounced the struggle and been released from internment in July 1940. There it was: that month again. I tried to track Desmond down in London. But he was dead by then. It was all tied together somehow. I knew it was. I just couldn’t see how.

‘Eventually, earlier this year, Eldritch was released. I only found out after the event. It was as unpublicized as his original imprisonment. I couldn’t establish where he’d gone. I was actually planning to call in on you and your mother in Paignton when I caught the news that Ardal Quilligan had been murdered in Ostend. I knew it had to be the break I was waiting for, although nothing the police said at this afternoon’s press conference told me anything about Eldritch. I suppose I’m relying on you to do that, Stephen.’

I told her as much as I could then: about the Quilligans and the Cardales and the Linleys; the forgery, the lawsuit, my efforts, along with Eldritch and Rachel, to prove her family had been cheated – and how those efforts had ended in disaster. What I didn’t mention was that if I found such proof now I’d help suppress it to win Rachel’s freedom. Nor could I solve for Moira the mystery of why her father had been killed and Eldritch incarcerated thirty-six long years ago.

‘Who can solve that mystery, Stephen?’ she asked when I’d finished.

‘Eldritch. And his old schoolmate, Sir Miles Linley.’

‘Who was using the flat in Merrion Street as a love nest.’

‘Supposedly. But that doesn’t quite fit with Eldritch being arrested there, does it?’

‘No. In fact, it sounds like a cover story.’

‘Cover for what?’

‘The secret I’ve been trying to gouge out of the solid stone wall they put up round this case thirty-six years ago.’

‘And who are
they
?’

‘Linley’s Secret Service friends and their Irish equivalents. I have a few contacts in the Dublin Government. Someone in my line of work has to. I tapped them for information after I learnt Eldritch had been released. They made it clear to me –
very
clear – that I should leave the story alone. There was a, quote, “security” dimension to it, whatever that meant in the context of something that took place so long ago. Of course, the IRA haven’t gone away in all those years. Quite the reverse. So, do they have something to do with it? I couldn’t persuade anyone to do more than frown enigmatically at me and change the subject. The one thing – the only thing – I got was almost a throwaway remark. “They’d never have let him go while Dev was living.”’

‘When did de Valéra die?’

‘Last August, two years after stepping down from the Presidency. And within months Eldritch was out.’

‘Does that imply de Valéra would have blocked his release, or simply been offended by it?’

‘I don’t know. But it certainly implies he knew what Eldritch was in for and wasn’t likely to have forgotten. Though, to be fair, Dev had a famously long memory and an old-school attitude to crime and punishment. Perhaps Eldritch is lucky he wasn’t hanged. A good few IRA prisoners were executed during the Second World War at Dev’s say-so.’

‘Whatever Eldritch was up to in July 1940, Moira, I can guarantee he wasn’t aiding and abetting the IRA.’

‘No. Of course not. But he was up to something, wasn’t he? Something big. Something it’s still very dangerous to know the truth about.’

‘Perhaps you should heed those warnings, then.’

‘Perhaps you should too.’

‘I can’t.’

‘No, well …’ Moira stubbed out her cigarette forcefully. ‘We have that in common, Stephen.’ Then she lit another.