The City of Strangers (47 page)

Then it was over again, as abruptly almost as it had begun.

She had to get back to Niamh. She was running again, and she was late again. But when she kissed him goodbye outside Bewley’s, she kissed him as he wanted her to kiss him. They didn’t make arrangements to meet again, but he had her address and he had her telephone. It didn’t seem to occur to her that anything else was happening other than that they were now going out together in some way they had both agreed to, in the easy ambiguity of that phrase.

He walked to Neary’s to have a drink, to sit on his own and take in what had happened, and enjoy taking it in. As for what it meant, that would work itself out; for now he was happy enough to let it all take its due course.

He had been in Neary’s for about half an hour, going over her words, and doing not much more, when something she had said as a joke struck him quite differently from the way it had when she said it. There had only been a few remarks about the problems Niamh was still trying to shake off. He heard one of them again now. ‘I thought she’d at least left all that paranoia behind. She’s been much happier since we got the house in Inchicore. She’s been going shopping on her own. Now it’s all gone haywire again. She won’t go out unless I’m with her. Last week she suddenly started saying someone was watching the house!’

It had been another one of those half-joking asides that meant she needed to let him know something, and wanted to make it sound as if she was on top of it when she wasn’t. He had thought no more of it, except to wonder what his reappearance would do in all this; would it help Niamh now or would it make things worse? But the words were in his head more disturbingly now, along with a conversation he had had with Dessie MacMahon when he had first got to Dublin for the trial.

Dessie had been stuck in Special Branch ever since being attached to the investigation into Mrs Harris’s death in March. No one had ever told him he had been transferred, but Superintendent Gregory had said he would be there until the trial. He had been expecting to go back to Pearse Street since the beginning of August, but he was still at Dublin Castle, and Terry Gregory was treating him like any other Special Branch detective, even to the extent of putting him on surveillance operations on various IRA members and fellow travellers. Recently that had included watching someone Stefan Gillespie knew well enough.

Dominic Carroll was in Ireland, apparently on his way home after another visit to Berlin. He was there to see his sick father in Monaghan, but he had been trying hard to engineer a meeting with Éamon de Valera through Republican-leaning friends in Fianna Fáil. It had got him nowhere. The messages back from the Taoiseach’s office had been polite enough, but they left no room for doubt. What they told Carroll was clear: he was lucky he was allowed into the country at all; the only interest Dev had in him was when he was leaving. None of that mattered to Stefan; what mattered were the last words Dominic Carroll had said to him in New York.

Dessie MacMahon was still at Dublin Castle when Stefan rang, and it was half an hour later that he walked into Neary’s.

Dominic Carroll was still in Dublin; he would be getting the plane from Foynes to New York in two days. There had been surveillance on him for most of the ten days he had been in the country, but Sergeant MacMahon wasn’t impressed by what that amounted to. Carroll knew the men who were watching him, so much so that when Dessie had followed him from the Shelbourne Hotel to Mass at the Pro-Cathedral the American had stopped him, offered him a cigarette, and asked him if he was new.

It was common knowledge that there were Special Branch men who would take a back-hander from Carroll; Dessie already had a good idea who they were. But there was little doubt that if the Clan na Gael leader wanted to slip the leash he could do it easily. Everyone assumed he had had several meetings with the IRA Army Council in Dublin, and that he hadn’t been troubled by anybody from the Special Branch about doing it.

It was almost dark when Stefan got off the tram in Inchicore. He had tried phoning the number Kate had given him, but there was no answer. She certainly didn’t know Dominic Carroll was in Ireland, but she should do. And he needed to know whether Niamh Carroll’s visions of people watching the house were paranoia or not.

He hammered on the door of the terraced house in Inchicore Square. No one came to answer. There were no lights on. There was no reason Kate and Niamh couldn’t be out, but it didn’t feel right. The impression he’d got was that Niamh didn’t like going out; that most of the time they were at home, especially at night. He moved quickly round to the back of the row of terraces; then he scrambled over the wall into the yard. He walked to the back door and put his shoulder to it and pushed.

He saw Kate O’Donnell as soon as he entered the kitchen. She was tied tightly, hand and foot, and she had been gagged. Her face was bruised.

‘They’ve taken her. They were here when I – I don’t even know –’

He untied her hands and left her to do the rest.

‘Where’s the phone?’

‘In the hall.’

Stefan called Dessie MacMahon at Dublin Castle for the second time.

‘Can you get a car?’

‘When?’

‘Now.’

‘I guess so.’

‘Will anyone know?’

‘Not if I don’t ask. Where are you –’

‘We’re at four Inchicore Square North. And Dessie, bring a gun.’

It was almost midnight when Dominic Carroll was woken by the telephone in his room at the Shelbourne Hotel. He switched on the lamp and answered sleepily but within seconds he was fully awake, sitting on the side of the bed.

‘Mr Carroll, there is a call for you.’

It was the Shelbourne operator. He wasn’t expecting anyone to phone him here, not unless something had gone wrong. But what else could it be at this time of night? They knew where she was. Surely it wasn’t hard to do.

Then another woman spoke. The voice was slightly muffled.

‘Mr Carroll, this is the Taoiseach’s office. I’m calling on behalf of Mr de Valera. He apologises for the lateness of the call, but he would very much appreciate it if you would meet him at Leinster House. He’s waiting here.’

Carroll’s heart was beating fast. This was what really mattered. This was what he had come for. It was what he thought had been thrown back in his face by the man he had once called a friend, a comrade and a leader.

‘You mean now?’

‘Yes, sir. We can send a car straight round to the Shelbourne. The Taoiseach is sure you understand that a meeting of this kind can’t happen publicly at the moment, with the situation as it is in Ireland and in Europe. It wasn’t possible for him to meet you any other way, but he doesn’t want you to return to New York without at least making contact. He has to stress that this meeting is completely private, and no one else is to know about it.’

‘I understand.’ He breathed deeply. ‘I’ll be in the lobby, five minutes.’

‘Thank you very much, Mr Carroll. The car will be waiting outside.’

He pulled on his clothes as quickly as he could. He was shaking with excitement; adrenalin was pumping round his body. Within minutes he was walking along the corridor to the lift. He had been wrong to believe that Éamon de Valera had shut himself off entirely from the past, and from the Republic that he had once been prepared to die for. The possibility of bringing the whole Republican movement back together, of repairing the rifts that everyone believed were irreparable, at a time when England had never been as vulnerable as it was, brought a flush of pleasure to his face. He had not wasted his time after all. The imminence of war had finally made Dev face facts. He would need the IRA; he would need Germany. And Dominic Carroll was the bridge. He felt, as he walked through the lobby, that this was the moment he had been waiting for, for many long years.

There was a black Humber Snipe outside the Shelbourne, the only car in sight. A big man got out from the driver’s door and walked towards him.

‘Mr Carroll?’

He nodded.

‘I’m here to take you to Leinster House, sir.’

Dominic Carroll smiled and nodded again.

The man opened a rear door and he got into the car. Seconds later it was heading into Merrion Row; it was only a few hundred yards into Merrion Square and Leinster House, and the Taoiseach’s office where Dev was waiting to talk to him. Last week he had been in Berlin, in Hermann Goering’s office. That would be no bad place to start, telling Dev that; it would give him the proper sense of how much Carroll mattered. They had been friends once, good friends; maybe they could be friends again. But Dominic Carroll had only moments to start to rehearse what he would say before the car slowed and stopped. The driver shook his head and cursed.

‘Jesus! Sorry, sir, you won’t believe it, I think I’ve got a flat –’

The Clan na Gael president didn’t have time to find this behaviour odd. It happened too fast. A man and a woman were standing under the archway of the Huguenot Cemetery, in an embrace. As the car pulled up they broke away from each other and walked quickly towards the car. Stefan Gillespie wrenched open the door of the car and got in beside Carroll; Kate O’Donnell pulled open the front passenger door and sat in. Stefan was already pointing a gun at the American when he slammed the door shut. The driver, Detective Sergeant Dessie MacMahon, pulled away at some speed.

Dominic Carroll stared at Stefan Gillespie in disbelief. For a moment it was less the shock of what was happening that hit him than the disappointment of what wasn’t. He had believed every word of that phone call. There was no reason on earth why he shouldn’t have done. He had tried to see Dev for over a week and he had been rebuffed. But the call had made complete sense, especially to a man who believed not only in his own importance but in the importance of his mission. And before he could take hold of what was going on now, of Stefan, Kate, the gun, he had to deal with the feeling in the pit of his stomach about what had been torn away from him. There was no meeting with Dev. It really had been a waste of time.

‘I’m sorry, Mr de Valera still doesn’t want to see you, Mr Carroll,’ said Stefan. He held the gun with the barrel pointing up to Carroll’s head.

The American was not a timid man. He didn’t yet understand why Stefan was pointing a gun at him, but along with a deep sense of his own importance came a sense of his invulnerability. Crossing Dominic Carroll wasn’t something anybody got away with, not in New York, not here.

‘It was well done, Sergeant, but is there a point to this?’

‘The point is Mrs Carroll. She was taken from her home.’

‘I have no contact with Niamh. I have nothing to do with her, or with the sister.’ The American spoke the last word with contempt. Kate looked ahead, tight-lipped; she had nothing to say, yet. ‘And I’d have thought after all your shenanigans in New York you’d know that as well as anybody.’

‘I don’t, Mr Carroll, not at all. Didn’t you tell me it wasn’t over, that morning in St Patrick’s? You’re a man of your word. And I don’t think anybody would take the Clan na Gael president’s wife off for an IRA court martial without his say-so, in fact without his orders. That’s what they told “the sister”, a court martial. They told her she wouldn’t see Niamh again.’

‘I don’t give orders here. If it’s true, it’s not my business.’

‘Jesus, but you’re a gobshite,’ said Kate, lighting a cigarette.

‘We’ll see,’ replied Stefan. ‘One way or another you’re going to have to start giving some orders to somebody – and I’d say pretty damn quick.’

The car drove south out of Dublin, through Donnybrook, Mount Merrion, Stilorgan, and Cabinteely, to Shankill. In Shankill village Dessie MacMahon took the long, straight road that led to the sea, Corbawn Lane. At the end he turned into the house on the right, Clifton, just before the beach, the house where Owen Harris had brought his mother’s dead body. It was an empty place, that’s all; that no one would think of, where no one would see or hear.

As the car stopped, Stefan took a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and snapped them on to Carroll’s wrists. He was very aware that the last time this had been done the wrists were his and the gun was pointing at him. And a man had died. Dessie opened the boot of the Humber; he took out two Tilley lamps and a crow bar. He handed the lamps to Kate O’Donnell and walked to the back door. He pushed the crow bar in the door jamb and wrenched it open. He walked ahead along a black corridor. He took the first door he came to. It led into a kitchen. As Stefan prodded Dominic Carroll into the room, Kate was lighting the lamps. He pushed Carroll down into a chair.

The American was unimpressed by the show.

‘So what now, Mr Gillespie? Are you going to shoot me?’

‘No, I probably won’t do that.’

‘Perhaps your friend will.’

Dessie was sitting down, lighting up a Sweet Afton.

‘I don’t know that he will either. But we’d be happy to leave you in here with “the sister” and come back. She went through quite a lot to get Niamh away from you. She’s a serious woman when it comes to her family.’

‘Is that it?’ laughed Carroll. ‘Is that all? You snatch me off the street and threaten me with a woman, over something I don’t even know about?’

‘You know well enough, Dominic.’

The words were the first Kate had spoken since Dublin. She looked across the room at him in the lamplight. The expression of amused contempt he threw in her direction wasn’t quite as confident as he wanted it to be. He didn’t really know Kate. He was sure about the two men. They might shoot him in a struggle, but they wouldn’t do it in cold blood. They wouldn’t do it if it achieved nothing. Saying nothing would be enough. He wasn’t afraid.

‘Well, I guess we sit here till you all get fed up with it.’

Kate walked forward to take the gun from Stefan. He hesitated as she put her hand on it, still holding on to it himself. He was trying to think how to push the threat hard enough to make Dominic Carroll talk. It wouldn’t be easy. The Clan na Gael man wouldn’t be softened up by a few punches. It would have to be more. But how far did he go? Kate smiled at him. He didn’t know what she was going to do but he trusted her instincts; he let her take the revolver.