Women of Courage (120 page)

Daly was stung. ‘Sure we can do it, Mick. I can guard him with some of our best boys, and take him for a walk halfway round the city first. That way no one would get within a mile of you.’

‘Then do that.’ Collins was no longer asking for advice. His mind was made up. ‘It seems to me that if there’s a fellow with such nerve that he can come all the way back from Germany for a second try, the least I can do is see him. And if you think he’s a fraud, search him before you bring him in to me, will you? I only want to talk about guns, not see them demonstrated.’

Daly grinned. After the rescue of Sean, everything seemed easy to him. He himself had captured a Browning machine gun today - perhaps the German would really bring them twenty Maxims. ‘All right then,’ he said. ‘Perhaps today was a lucky omen.’

Collins grinned back. ‘Luck be damned. It’s all down to brilliance, guts, and good planning. Now, where shall we meet this fellow?’

Davis was typing out a report when Kee came in. It was a result of all the paperwork he had presented Kee with early that morning, in order to ensure that Kee did not go up to the Joy too soon. It also created an impression of industriousness on his own part. Before Christmas he had thought Kee was highly impressed with him, but recently he had been less sure. He felt he was being deliberately excluded from things, and that worried him. This Ulsterman was far more paranoid than his dead colleague Radford. And after today’s escape, Davis thought, Kee would be livid. Possibly he would collapse and turn in on himself, give up because of the treachery all round him. If he did that it would be a great victory. But if he did not, and carried on as he had been, he would have to go, too.

Davis felt a secret surge of excitement as Kee came in. It was like the thrill he had felt when he had said goodbye to Radford for the last time - casually, as though they would meet the next day, when all the time Davis had known they would not. It was like being the author of a play, he thought, sitting on stage and manipulating his characters while they spoke to him. Only Davis knew what had really happened today: everyone else, Kee included, was still guessing and reacting to the shock. Davis looked up, interested, to see what Kee’s reaction would be.

Kee came in and sat on the desk opposite. He was disappointingly calm, Davis thought. He had expected histrionics, anger, frustration. Instead there was a grim, collected, withdrawn look to the man. He didn’t even speak for a half a minute. Davis glanced down at the paper, and typed a few more words. He realized that Foster had come in too, and was standing behind him.

‘Busy, Dick?’ Kee said at last.

‘I am that. All these reports.’ Davis lifted the pile of papers from his desk, to show how many pages were left.

‘You’re good at paperwork. I’ll say that for you.’ But there was something distinctly odd about the way he said it. Davis looked up, and an alarm bell began to ring in his mind. Why wasn’t Kee talking about Brennan’s escape?

Kee took a paper from his pocket. ‘Seen that before, Dick?’

Davis took it. It was the order for the release of Sean Brennan. His stomach fluttered. He passed it back. ‘No.’

‘You won’t have seen this either.’ Kee passed over a typewritten sheet, the transcript of the recorded conversations between Brennan and O’Rourke.

Davis read it slowly. When he got to the remarks about
one of his own bloody detectives
his hand began to shake. He put the paper down carefully on the typewriter.

‘Brennan said this?’

‘He did.’

‘That’s dreadful.’ Davis decided to play it out to the end. Perhaps he was misinterpreting that look on Kee’s face. There were a dozen detectives in G Division.
How could they possibly know it was him?
He said: ‘It would explain why so many things go wrong.’

‘You’re right there, you bastard.’ Kee stood up, his big hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. ‘It would explain why so many detectives have died. Including Bill Radford.’

That was when Davis got up. He stood up quickly, and in the same movement turned for the door, drawing his arm back to punch Foster in the stomach. But the big young man was ready for him. He seized Davis’s arm at the wrist, and forced the arm downwards and back so that it nearly cracked at the elbow. In a brief struggle, Davis’s head got cracked against the doorpost, and Kee and Foster managed to pin his arms behind him in handcuffs. Kee shoved him roughly back into his chair. He glared at Davis, panting.

‘If I had a rope, I’d hang you right now.’

‘But why, for God’s sake? You’re mad, both of you!’

‘Are we?’ Kee waved the order form in Davis’s face. ‘You know what this is, don’t you? I’ve just come from Captain Smythe, and he told me exactly how you got him out of his office and confirmed that the form came from his notepad. So you can forget about sitting there all sweet-faced with your typing. That’s why you came to me this morning with all those details, wasn’t it? To keep me busy while your friends got the bastard out!’

A sudden impulse seized him. ‘I’ll bet you send copies of this to your murderous friends, too, don’t you?’ He ripped the report out of the typewriter, and riffled through the sheets. One carbon copy, two, three,
four.
Davis groaned. In a few minutes they would search him, too. And in his jacket pocket there were three neatly folded carbons of the other reports he had typed that afternoon. There was no escaping them, now.

He looked past Kee, out of the window. It was the last one without bars which he was likely to see for a very long time.

There were no windows at all in the cellar. Just a metal grille high in the wall which, presumably, provided some ventilation. But there was not much air. There was an unpleasant, musty, stuffy smell, and Catherine began to think that the oil lamp might be using up as much oxygen as she was.

After Andrew had left she had tried hard to remove the chain from her ankle. It was not so very tight; there was no restriction on her circulation. With her boot off the chain hung down like an ugly anklet. She pointed her toe and forced the chain down, a millimetre at a time, until it was almost, almost over her heel.

Almost, but not quite. The harder she pushed it, the more the links pressed into her skin. The pain became intense. And there was still a point beyond which it simply would not go.

Infuriated, she pulled it back to where it hung loose again, massaged her aching ankle, and turned her attention to the pipe that ran along the wall. It was fastened to the wall by metal bolts every two or three feet. Perhaps they could be loosened. Certainly they were old and rusty, and looked as though they had been there for some time. But after ten minutes of ferociously pulling, tugging, and jerking the chain on it this way and that, Catherine gave up. The pipe was rock solid. It hadn’t moved a fraction of an inch in any direction. She was stuck.

She sat back on the dusty, ancient sofa, and for the first time allowed herself to think of what had happened. She had been kidnapped, clearly, but why? Last night she had made love to the man, tonight he had locked her in a filthy cellar. The logic of it eluded her. She knew he was a British spy. So what? She hadn’t known where his house was, until he had shown her himself. She didn’t know what his plans were. She didn’t even have a photograph of him to give the Volunteers so that they could identify him.

And in any case, she had not seriously intended to betray him. There had been enough killing, she wanted nothing more to do with it. Only last night she had taken him to her bed, and if he had behaved like a brute there, he had given her pleasure too. Did Andrew think she was such an unfeeling monster that she could make love to him one night, and then hand him over to be shot the next? The man must be mad to think that.

Perhaps he
was
mad.

She remembered his eyes, in that moment of appalling, earsplitting echoes after he had fired the gun. The eyes had been hard, cold, with an expression of delight in them too, of pleasure in what he had done. That was why she had obeyed him. Because in that moment she had truly believed he would shoot her next.

She began to shiver, and wondered if she would freeze to death, starve, or suffocate from lack of air. If Andrew was really mad, perhaps he would leave her here for ever.

Then he came in with a tray of food. It was not very appetizing: fried egg, bacon burnt at the edges, a slice of bread, a cup of tea. He set it on the sofa beside her.

‘I’m no great cook, I’m afraid. But it’s what I could find.’

‘Andrew. When are you going to set me free?’

He considered the question, standing a yard or so in front of her, out of reach. ‘Maybe tomorrow evening, if all goes well.’

‘You mean you’re going to leave me here all night? But why, for heaven’s sake?’

She thought he smiled, though his face was dark, shadowy. ‘I thought you liked the unexpected.’

‘I think you’re mad.’ It was a statement, not a challenge.

‘No. Just determined. I have a job to do, and you know enough to spoil it. As soon as it’s over you’ll be free, I promise.’

‘What are you talking about? What do I know?’

Instead of answering, he glanced round the room and shivered. ‘It’s cold in here. You should eat your food while it’s hot. I’ll bring you down some blankets and pillows, and a bucket.’

Then he was gone. She ignored the food. He returned a few minutes later with a pile of blankets and pillows which he dumped on the floor. He put a metal bucket there too, with a newspaper in it. All the time he stayed at a distance, just out of her reach.

She asked: ‘What the hell do I need a bucket for?’

‘That’s not a very ladylike question. I’ll bring you a bowl of water in the morning, if you want to wash.’

He really does mean it, she thought. Shivering, she sipped the tea. She realized he would go again in a minute and she didn’t want that. She tried to make her voice calmer, more friendly.

‘Andrew, I don’t understand anything at all about this. Can’t you at least have the decency to explain?’

He sat down on one of the old trunks. To her anger, he seemed more amused than anything else; certainly not embarrassed.

‘It’s a bit of change from Killrath, isn’t it? My apologies, Catherine. I’d rather keep you in a bedroom upstairs, if I could. But then you’d scream, or throw something out of the window, and people would come. So this is the only place. No one knows you’re here, no one can hear you, and you can’t get out. Just resign yourself to it. I’ll bring you anything you need, within reason.’

‘What I need is to get out of here and go to see Sean Brennan. That’s what I came to Dublin for - you know that!’

He stood up. ‘Yes. Even after last night all you can think of is Sean Brennan. Well, I’m sorry, Miss O’Connell-Gort, but that is exactly the reason why you have to stay here. At least you can share part of the little murderer’s fate, if not his presence.’ He picked up the oil lamp, and put it down within her reach, with a box of matches. ‘I should blow this thing out at night; it doesn’t feel full.’ Then he walked to the door and went out.

‘Andrew!’ But she heard the sound of the bolts being rammed home, and his feet climbing the stairs. ‘Come back, you pig,’ she whispered to herself.

But he didn’t. Gloomily, she picked up the plate of rapidly cooling food, and began to eat.

He’s right. This is what it is like for Sean, she thought.

Sean dreamed about the hangman. He himself was standing on a trapdoor, his hands bound behind him, with a noose around his neck. There was a priest beside him, muttering prayers, who held out a crucifix for him to kiss. But Sean’s eyes were on the hangman who had a black hood over his head, with two slits in it for his eyes. The hangman stepped back, pulled a lever, and Sean fell through the trap. There was a sudden, terrible pain, then darkness, and then
he was still in the room!
His body was hanging there but he, Sean, was somewhere above, looking down at the little group of people who busied themselves around it.

The hangman cut his body down, laid it in a coffin, and walked away, out of the prison, still wearing the black hood over his head. Sean followed him, watching. The hangman rode a bicycle at first, but no one took any special notice of him. He bought some fruit in a greengrocer’s and put it in the basket on the handlebars of his bike. He went into a pub and drank a pint of porter at the bar. Sean went up close to try to see his face, but all he could see was two grey cold eyes through the slits, and a line of froth where the mouth was, as if he somehow strained the porter through the cloth. It was very important for Sean to see the face but each time he came close the hangman waved his arm and Sean felt himself brushed away, like a troublesome, invisible fly.

Then the hangman went out and this time he didn’t take his bike, he took a cab. The cab went along the North Circular Road and turned left and Sean became very agitated. He knew he was tossing and turning in his bed but he couldn’t wake up. The cab stopped outside the house in Nelson Street and the hangman got out, his black mask still over his face, the brown paper bag of fruit in his hand. Sean moaned and said: ‘No! No! Please no!’ but no one could hear him because he had no body or voice to shout with. The hangman knocked at the door and Catherine opened it. She was slim and naked and she smiled seductively at the hangman. He held out the bag of fruit and she took a red apple, and while she was biting it he bent forward and kissed her neck through his mask. Sean saw the hangman’s hairy hands slide down her back and stroke her thighs, and the other apples spilled out of the bag and bounced wildly down the steps. Then Sean woke up, sweating.

There was a grey dawn light seeping through the window. There were white net curtains and a crucifix on the wall opposite with the body of Christ visible faintly against the dark wood. In the bed next to him Seamus Kelly was snoring gently. He could hear the rattle of a tram through the window, and the murmur of women’s voices somewhere downstairs.

Sean realized he was free. He could get up if he liked and walk out of the room and no one would stop him. He could have a wash in a clean basin and walk down the garden to the privy on his own and read the newspaper and help the landlady wash the dishes if he chose. He could watch the hurling on Saturday or ride out to the country with Seamus to try to snare rabbits. Maybe Collins would send him to join a country unit and attack an RIC barracks.