The City of Strangers (43 page)

‘You’re right. Best bet is America. No one knows where they are.’

‘You think they would with a guard asking the questions?’

‘So that’s it?’

Dessie nodded.

‘Maybe they’ll hear from them when they get there?’

‘I lived in a room like this till I was twelve,’ said Dessie. ‘My father died in it. He was thirty-seven. The day they took his body away was the first time I ever had a bed. No one paid my mother to get us out, but when she found a way, no one heard from us again. They’re gone. That’s how it is.’ He walked out.

As he did so it was as if a shutter had come down.

When Stefan went back into town he crossed Grafton Street and walked through to Hodges Figgis in Dawson Street. He was looking for a book. He wanted it to be special, but not so special as to be embarrassing. He wanted something with pictures, or drawings, but he didn’t want it to be ordinary; he wanted something that Kate O’Donnell would be surprised by.

He looked for a long time along the shelves in the bookshop, and when he found it he liked the fact that it wasn’t a new book at all, but a battered book of poems, illustrated by an artist whose work he recognised without needing to see the name. There was a book of Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales at home that his mother had bought for Tom two Christmases ago, with similar pictures; though the rich, intricate, swirling figures in Harry Clarke’s drawings had slightly alarmed him. Stefan smiled as he flicked through the pages. The style was the same, but the female figures in this book would have alarmed his mother this time; he didn’t think they would alarm Kate. She would know Harry Clarke; she would know his illustrations as well as his stained glass windows. The poems were by Algernon Charles Swinburne. Nobody read Swinburne any more, but somehow he felt that made the book less ordinary too.

It cost a lot more than he had intended to spend. The assistant in Hodges Figgis eyed him awkwardly as he paid, then put the book in a heavy paper bag, folding the top securely twice. He started to tie string round it.

‘There’s no need to tie –’

‘It’s all right, sir.’ The assistant kept tying. ‘It’s not a book that should have been on the open shelves so. It must have been put there by mistake.’

Stefan looked puzzled; the man was whispering.

‘The illustrations,’ mouthed the assistant without any sound at all.

Kate O’Donnell had been back in Ireland for almost a week, since the
Empress of Canada
had docked at Belfast. She and her sister were staying with their parents in Dún Laoghaire. Kate was trying to find a job and somewhere to live with Niamh. The kindness of their parents would be something that neither of them would be able to take for very long. They wanted to help, but they also wanted to know nothing about anything, and from the moment the two women arrived at the high flat-fronted terrace in Monkstown Road, Mr and Mrs O’Donnell were in constant fear that their kindness would involve them facing things they expected Niamh and Kate to leave at the door. For Kate and her sister, who didn’t want to talk anyway, except to each other, it was still a cloying, claustrophobic, nervy atmosphere, where any ill-timed word seemed to reduce everyone in the house to silence.

The first thing Kate had done was to send a postcard to Stefan Gillespie in Baltinglass. She wanted to see him as soon as possible anyway, but she needed to see him too. He was the only person who knew everything, and that meant he was someone she could say anything to. She told him to call as soon as he could. And she knew he would come soon. But by the time Stefan got off the tram in Dún Laoghaire something had changed. No one had considered it his business what Military Intelligence intended to do with the information Niamh Carroll had given him. That was over. G2 had the IRA key and it would open up all the ciphers John Cavendish had collected. But they had all – Stefan, Kate, Niamh – been naïve to think that would be the end of the matter.

Commandant de Paor had arrived at the house in Monkstown Road two days after Kate and Niamh came home. Niamh spent eight hours the next day in the G2 offices at Portobello Barracks being questioned. De Paor wanted anything else she had; names, places, courier routes. It had been three years since she had had any contact with Clan na Gael or the IRA; the key to the cipher was all she had to give. The questioning wasn’t harsh, but it was more than enough to break the fragile confidence Niamh Carroll was struggling to find. The news of Jimmy Palmer’s death had already made her withdrawn and tearful. It had already made her want to run again. The feeling that she couldn’t shake off what she had already run from, that there was just another set of people to watch her and follow her plunged her back into a black, unmoving depression that not only filled Kate with anger, it would make staying at her parents’ home even more impossible than before.

So when Stefan Gillespie stood on the doorstep at 18 Monkstown Road the reception he received was very different from the one he was expecting. It was Kate’s mother who answered the door. When he gave his name she looked at him slightly oddly. He thought she must have heard it and couldn’t quite place him. So it was only for a joke that he said, ‘Just tell her it’s Sergeant Gillespie.’ The joke didn’t go down well. Mrs O’Donnell stared at him for a moment, almost with a look of fear, and turned back into the house, shouting Kate’s name at the top of her voice, and leaving him on the doorstep.

A moment later Kate appeared; she wasn’t smiling; she didn’t ask him to come in. She walked out on to the path and pulled the front door to behind her. Stefan was smiling, clutching his parcel from Hodges Figgis.

‘It’s good to see you.’

She didn’t reply.

‘I got you something, I thought –’

Something was wrong. He didn’t know what to say.

‘Why couldn’t you leave her alone?’

‘What?’

‘Have you got more questions? What’s it going to be today?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, you said I should –’

‘I went to the barracks. Eight hours we were there. It was like she’d been arrested. I don’t know whether they were soldiers or policemen. They kept asking questions she couldn’t answer. They kept mentioning you. “Mr Gillespie told us … Sergeant Gillespie said … In the sergeant’s report …” Aren’t they satisfied yet? Have they sent you back for more, is that it?’

‘Kate, I’ve come to see you.’

‘No flowers then? Really, Sergeant!’

He was glad he had abandoned the idea of flowers.

‘I had no idea, Kate. I didn’t know –’

Her face was flushed with anger; but he could see tears too.

‘Leave us alone. If you need some more thanks – thanks! Fuck off!’

She strode back into the house. The door slammed shut.

He stood for a moment, holding his hat and his parcel. He stepped off the path and put the Hodges Figgis bag down on the sill of the bay window. She could do what she liked with it. He put on his hat. And he walked away.

When the two cars drove into the farmyard at Pallas Strand, Colm McCarthy was watching. He had been driving the cattle out to the Long Field, the closest field to the sea, the one that almost met the beach. Walking back he had heard the sound of the engines over the quiet pulse of the breakers and the lazy calling of the gulls. They were expected.

Dinnie Purcell had cycled from Horan’s at the crossroads to say they had left the Garda Barracks in Castleberehaven just after ten o’clock.

The Garda sergeant and the army commandant had been in County Cork for three days now; in the city, in Cobh, in Macroom, in Drimoleague, in Kealkill. They had spoken to almost all the hurlers who had travelled to New York. Some knew nothing, and those who did said nothing at first; several remarked that although they knew nothing the man who had died had had it coming. There were no witnesses however to challenge the empty statements of ignorance and righteous indifference, real and unreal.

It was what Stefan Gillespie had expected; it was what the Garda Commissioner had told Commandant Gearóid de Paor to expect. But de Paor had his duty to do, to his friend John Cavendish and his fellow officer, Captain Cavendish. And in Cobh one of the young hurlers finally found the death harder to ignore than he wanted it to be. He told Stefan and the G2 commandant that four of them had followed Cavendish up to the empty thirty-second floor of the Hampshire House from Dominic Carroll’s apartment, where Colm McCarthy had confronted the man who had murdered his father seventeen years before. There had been hard words and a short, ugly argument, and then a fight. But it hadn’t been much of a fight; they had held John Cavendish down and they had beaten him.

If he hadn’t denied it all, maybe it wouldn’t have happened; if he hadn’t told Colm McCarthy that he had nothing to do with the death of his father all those years ago, nothing to do with the body half-buried on Pallas Strand, maybe they wouldn’t have hurt him so much. It was the lying that turned Colm McCarthy’s anger into fury. So, yes, they had given the captain a beating like hell; nothing like the hell the man deserved. But they’d stopped; they’d stopped and they’d walked away from it.

No one wanted it to go any further. Even McCarthy had had enough by then. And they had left him there alive. They went downstairs again and left the party. They had nothing to do with John Cavendish’s death. The first any of them knew was when they were briefly questioned on the way to the boat next day.

After that it was easier for Stefan Gillespie and Gearóid de Paor to get the others to talk, but what they said was the same, exactly the same. They left him alive.

Commandant de Paor had always known that the last place they would come to would be the farm on Pallas Strand, right at the end of Cork on the Béarra Peninsula. It was where it had all begun, during the Civil War, and where the truth about how it had ended lay now. On the last night, in the hotel at Castleberehaven, the G2 commander had shown Stefan three hand-written pages from a notebook. They were the records John Cavendish had kept as a young Free State intelligence officer in 1922. It began with the afternoon that Luke McCarthy, a farmer of Pallas Strand, Cappanell, a well-known IRA man, had been taken to the police barracks in Castleberehaven for questioning about a bomb attack the previous day, in nearby Kenmare.

The two cars stopped in front of the farm. In the first car were a detective from Castleberehaven and two uniformed Gardaí. The detective was armed and in the back of the Austin there was a rifle. They weren’t expecting trouble, but they were uneasy. This investigation wasn’t something anyone in Cork wanted. The McCarthys were an old and respected Republican family; it was no secret that they still had close ties to the IRA. No one needed the past stirred up, whether it was by the young McCarthy or these outsiders, the Garda sergeant and the army commandant. The dead were dead, and the decent thing was to leave them dead. Some things needed to be buried with them. But the local men had no say in this. They preferred it to be left that way as well. The two men from Dublin would ask the questions.

Stefan recognised the young man who was standing in the farmyard watching them with defiance and undisguised contempt. It was the hurler who had launched into that strange, drunken conversation with John Cavendish on St Patrick’s Day in New York. He looked sober enough now. And now Sergeant Gillespie knew what that conversation had been about; he knew what its consequences had been. He walked forward and spoke briskly. He was fully aware that their arrival was no surprise to anyone here.

‘I’m Sergeant Gillespie. You may know why we’re here.’

Colm McCarthy said nothing. He wasn’t afraid of these people.

‘We met in New York, on St Patrick’s Day, when you were talking to Captain Cavendish,’ continued Stefan. ‘I don’t know if you remember me.’

The young hurler was surprised. It wasn’t something Stefan had said to anyone else in the team, and no one had recognised him so far. But he wanted McCarthy to know he had been there. It would unsettle him. And it would cut through all the pretence and evasion that had had to be cleared out of the way with the others. It wasn’t about what had happened across an ocean, out of sight. Stefan was there. And even if McCarthy didn’t remember much of that night very clearly, he was unsettled. The Garda sergeant’s words took him back. The questions that he expected to be at a distance were very close.

There were two more people in the farmyard now. Maura McCarthy, Colm’s mother and an older man Stefan Gillespie knew; the man who had broken up the argument in Carroll’s apartment and had pulled the hurler away from the drunken confrontation. He was also the man who had looked so hard at the army officer, the man he was sure John Cavendish had recognised. Aidan McCarthy was Colm’s uncle; he had married Maura McCarthy two years after her husband’s body was found on Pallas Strand.

‘Since you’ll know every move we’ve made through County Cork, we can dispense with the formalities.’ De Paor spoke now, stepping in front of Stefan. He wanted to get on with this. ‘Sergeant Gillespie is investigating the death of Captain John Cavendish. I am Commandant de Paor. I was the captain’s commanding officer. You’ll know the questions, so there’s no need to waste the sergeant’s time on shite. We’ll want your front room, so.’

De Paor stepped past the woman and the older man by the door, ignoring them as he walked into their house. Officially he was there to observe, but though he had never given Stefan an order, it was done his way.

‘We’ll start with you, Mr McCarthy,’ said Stefan to Colm.

The hurler shrugged. Despite the disturbing presence of the policeman who had stood beside the Free State soldier at the Hampshire House, the defiance was still there as he passed his mother and his uncle. His mother smiled in reassurance. Stefan followed him inside. Maura and Aidan McCarthy stayed outside. Neither of them spoke. There were two cars, and there were men in uniforms watching them. There were guns, even if they couldn’t see them. For a moment it was seventeen years ago. Mrs McCarthy was standing with her dead husband and the man who was his brother, and the small boy who was now a man. Aidan McCarthy was back there too. Bile rose in his throat. It was not a place either of them was happy to be.