Women of Courage (74 page)

So when at last they came out into the cold night air she had leant against Sean, naturally, easily, wanting to make the warmth last a little longer.

He had walked her home, one arm round her, wheeling his bicycle with the other. She wondered, now, if she had been a sort of passport for him, for the soldiers and the police were less likely to stop a young couple together. But it had been the natural thing to do, after all.

She could not invite him in and she did not want the servants to see, so she had stopped on the corner of Merrion Square and pointed across the little park to her house.

‘That?’ he said. ‘Sure it’s a mansion!’

‘A town house. I told you I was an aristocrat.’ She tried to make out his expression in the dim gaslight. ‘Are you shocked?’

‘No. Well, yes, maybe a little.’ He glanced at the house again and shook his head. ‘To think you live in a place like that and still spend time with me. Do - do you have all of it?’

She laughed. ‘Yes. Well, Father has half, and then there’s the servants. We’re great employers, you know. There’s half a dozen people in there.’

‘Is that so?’ He took his arm away from her waist, and put both hands on the handlebars.

‘Sean.’ She had not wanted the contact to end. She had been alone for so much of her life; that was the way of her father’s world, the world she had been born into. Sean was at once himself to her, and the spirit of the people, the warmth of the ceilidh. She reached out and held him. ‘I know it’s unjust, but don’t blame me now. It was a grand evening, wasn’t it? I don’t want it to end.’

When he put the bicycle against the wall and embraced her it had been oddly aggressive, fierce, as though he had to overcome something within himself to do it. But that she only remembered later, when she thought about it carefully, languorously, alone in her bed. For in all her nineteen years, it was the first time she had embraced any boy alone, like this.

She had thought perhaps he would kiss her lips and so he had, but only briefly. Then he had kissed her eyes and her cheeks and her hair, and held her close to him, very hard. They were nearly the same height, and his bristly cheek rubbed against hers. She nuzzled against him like an animal, and he leaned back, his hands clasped behind her, and lifted her off her feet.

‘You’re a lovely girl for all that,’ he said. ‘I can carry you - look!’ He turned in a circle, whirling her round with her feet in the air, and put her down panting.

‘That’s a new dance,’ she said.

‘Yes.’ And then they had looked into each other’s eyes in the shadows of the gaslight, and their smiles had faded and they had indeed kissed each other’s lips, very slowly and long until neither had any breath left; and then they tried again and got the breathing better, and in fact the whole thing was so very much better that they might have gone on, with short pauses, for the rest of the night, had not a policeman scrunched into the square behind them, and coughed discreetly to let them know he was there.

It had been a cold night. But half an hour later, as she climbed shivering into her bed, she wondered how it was that she had never felt warmer in her life than in those few minutes, crushed against his overcoat outside in the square.

A fortnight later, staring at her face in the mirror in the Viceregal Lodge, she wondered what he had been carrying in the pockets of that coat.

Sir Jonathan O’Connell-Gort was in a fine, cold rage. He thought he could not have looked a greater fool if he had tried. Newly appointed Divisional Army Intelligence Officer, he had met Sir John French on the train that morning to brief him on the current reports, and to plan an improvement to the service. He had served briefly under French in France, before Haig took over, and he respected him for a fine officer who did not suffer fools gladly. Sir Jonathan had had a good war, and he had hoped to make a good impression on the little Field Marshal. He felt confident in his local knowledge, and had a report in his pocket suggesting that Michael Collins and his murder gang were short of arms, exhausted, nearly finished. Sir Jonathan agreed. The people of Ireland, he felt, had had enough. The crisis was nearly over.

So he had thought this morning, as he had motored through the cold, crisp air of Galway. And then, in quick succession, he had been humiliated by his daughter, and nearly murdered by Collins and his thugs.

His discussions with French on the train had been polite but frosty. The conference in the Viceregal Lodge, which had just ended, had been tempestuous. The Lord Lieutenant was a brave, choleric soldier, with a great deal of physical courage, as Sir Jonathan had seen in the car. But he also had a strong sense of the dignity of his position. He had not, he told Sir Jonathan, been appointed His Majesty’s Viceroy in Ireland in order to indulge in pistol fights with street hooligans. Nor did he expect his Intelligence Officer to feed him pure unadulterated stupidity. Clearly the Irish Republican Army was neither unarmed, nor exhausted, nor finished. If it had been quiet for a couple of weeks, they now knew why - because it had been planning an operation on a rather grander scale than the murder of a few policemen. And it had nearly succeeded. Perhaps the British Army Intelligence Service was staffed exclusively by blind deaf morons, but clearly the same could not be said of the IRA. They appeared to have known the exact time and place that his train would arrive, and which car he normally travelled in. If the IRA’s Director of Intelligence, Michael Collins, was able to get hold of such facts, then the sooner the man was arrested or shot, the better. Perhaps, Lord French suggested, if Sir Jonathan and his colleagues ever did get hold of Collins, they could ask him to put on a training course, to show them how an intelligence service should be run.

It had been a very painful interview indeed, and Sir Jonathan’s temper had not been improved when he came out of the room. Lord French’s butler had glided up to inform him, smoothly, that his daughter had been served with tea in a drawing room and would no doubt expect to see him shortly.

‘What?’ Only his lifelong training had prevented Sir Jonathan from cursing his daughter out loud. ‘Yes, thank you, Chitham. I’ll see her when I have time.’ And more self-control, he thought bitterly, as he strode down the corridor. If I meet that girl now this house will be treated to a family row the like of which hasn’t been seen since the Normans!

He had thought she had stopped all that nonsense over the past year. Studying medicine was hardly his idea of a ladylike thing to do, but at least it had seemed to keep her quiet. It was respectable, too, in a bizarre sort of way - better than all that agitation she had made a few years ago about evictions, tenants’ rights, and the damned Irish Republic! He had thought she had calmed down, and forgotten all that Sinn Fein nonsense. She hadn’t spoken of it to him when he was at home. She had been quiet, polite, friendly, as she had used to be - that was why he had risked inviting her on to the train. It just showed how out of touch one could get, when one was away from home so often.

‘Sir Jonathan?’

A voice broke into his thoughts - a strange, rather quiet voice, almost apologetic. He turned, and saw a small, round, inoffensive man, a civilian, looking at him from a doorway. The man wore spectacles, and had a pale, mouselike, bookish air. He recognized him as a sort of civil servant; Harrison, that was the name. An important fellow, he recalled, more imposing than he looked. Had the ear of people in high places in London as well as here.

‘Yes. What is it? You know the place is in uproar - there’s been an assassination attempt.’

‘Yes. It’s that I want to talk to you about. If you could spare me two minutes.’

Despite his anger, Sir Jonathan had nowhere precise, at this moment, to use the surplus energy the shock had given him. He had to mobilize an attempt to find the assassins, of course, but that was being done already; and if they had not been caught at Ashtown, nothing he could do would catch them in the next five minutes.

‘Yes, of course.’

He strode through the door, into the little man’s surprisingly large and comfortable office. There was a Persian carpet on the floor, bookcases round two of the walls, and wide windows giving an impressive view of Phoenix Park. The little man indicated a leather armchair.

‘I heard about the shooting. I imagine the Viceroy has ordered you to bring in the assassins without delay. And their leader, Michael Collins, in particular?’

‘Something of the sort, yes.’ It didn’t take a lot of political sense to realize that, Sir Jonathan thought.

Harrison sat down opposite Sir Jonathan and contemplated him carefully. He pressed the tips of his fingers together in front of his mouth, as though he were at prayer.

‘You will not find it easy to catch Michael Collins.’

Sir Jonathan realized with a shudder that the man must be half-blind; for his spectacles were so thick that they magnified his eyes to two or three times the normal size.

‘No, perhaps not,’ he agreed. ‘But I’m going to try every method until we do.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ The little man moved his fingers forward from his lips, but kept them pressed together, carefully, in concentration. ‘I too have been thinking long and hard about that man, Sir Jonathan, and I have a suggestion which I would like you to consider …’

3. Kee

‘W
ASTE.’

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘That.’ Kee indicated the body in front of him with a brief movement of his big, flat hand. The body lay face down in the road outside the country pub, where it had fallen. The head was framed by a puddle of clotted blood, like a mockery of a medieval halo. The hair would probably stick to the road, Kee thought, when they moved him. The brains might fall out too, if there was a large exit wound underneath.

Irritably, he explained himself. ‘It’s a waste, wouldn’t you say, Detective Sergeant? A terrible, dreadful waste of a young man’s life?’

In the silence that followed, he found he had shouted. The uniformed men, standing at a respectful distance, gazed at him stolidly. Several soldiers and RIC men, combing the road for bombs and bullets, glanced curiously over their shoulders. Get a grip on yourself, Tom, he thought. They’re nervous as it is; they look to you for support.

He was conscious of a surge of emotions within himself - revulsion at the sight before him; anger at the men who had caused it; even fear, that one day they might do this to him. He looked at Davis, his detective sergeant, and thought he saw the fear reflected in a face that was unusually closed, stony, grey.

‘Come on, Dick,’ he said more quietly. ‘Let’s get it done.’ He knelt down, put his arms under the body, and rolled it over. The body was floppy, soft, limp. The bullet hole in the shattered left eye socket had dust and grit in it. There seemed to be no exit wound. A gobbet of still-moist blood leaked out of the mouth and slithered jerkily down the cheek.

‘Great God Almighty.’ Kee felt his gorge rising and turned away. He saw Davis still standing there, watching, not moving to help. Anger forced down his disgust. ‘Come on, Dick, bear a hand, can’t you? At least it’s one of theirs for a change, for what that’s worth.’

Just a young boy, he thought, sitting back on his haunches and holding down his bile. A stupid bloody kid. The body looked oddly small in death, shrunken like a child’s. Davis, like the other big men numbly staring at it, was six foot two - all the officers of the Dublin Metropolitan Police had got into the force partly because of their height. A magnificent body of men, they were called. And now they all went in fear of their lives because of an undersized bunch of kids.

The hair, tangled and matted by its halo of blood, stuck up ragged and unruly as an urchin’s. The clothes were more respectable: working man’s jacket, decent trousers, tie even. Cycle clips on the trousers, and an automatic pistol in the right-hand jacket pocket.

Kee turned the limp head to one side, so that the wound did not gape so directly at him. A uniformed sergeant approached.

‘This was on the ground over there, Inspector,’ he said. He held out the pin of a hand grenade.

Kee nodded, wiped his sticky hands on the dead man’s jacket, and turned back to the gun. German - a Parabellum 9-mm automatic. He opened the grip and checked the magazine. Two rounds still in it. So that’s what they use, he thought. He held it out to Davis. ‘Look at that, Dick - that was never looted from a landlord’s shooting room. Now let them say they didn’t get help from the Boche!’

Still Davis hadn’t spoken. He just stood, watching, as though struck dumb. Kee felt annoyed and surprised. He had come to Dublin from Belfast six weeks ago, and had begun to respect Dick Davis as one of the most resilient and cheerful officers of the Dublin Metropolitan Police G Division. And in the past few months they had needed someone cheerful, God knew. G Division was the section of the DMP which dealt with political offenders - at least, that was the theory. But recently it was the political offenders who had been dealing with G Division. In the past six months four G men had been shot dead in the street, one only two weeks ago. Each time the street had been crowded, but no one had seen or heard anything. Only the shots, and men walking or cycling calmly away, leaving a detective twitching in the gutter. No one recognized the murderers, or could describe them. No one had been arrested or charged.

There were a dozen men in G Division, and most of them had received warning letters. The letters were printed in large, clumsy, childish capitals, quite easy to read and impossible to trace. They warned the recipient that if he did not cease his treacherous activities against the Irish Republic, he could expect the same fate as his colleagues. Two men, pleading the strain on their families, had asked for a transfer to the criminal branch. Several others, Kee was sure, had simply ceased doing the job. In order to keep the Division going at all, a new Assistant Commissioner, William Radford, had been brought in from Belfast, and Kee had come with him.

Kee had not received a threatening letter yet, but Davis had. He had folded it into a paper aeroplane, lit the tail, and flown it out of the window. He had continued to investigate as actively as before. He was unmarried, intelligent, ambitious. In the last few weeks, Kee had come to rely on him more and more. They had got nowhere, but at least he felt they had not stopped trying.