Women of Courage (97 page)

‘I wish you luck,’ Collins said. ‘It’s a nasty job you boys have to do. How do they know he’s using that house, do you think?’

The two men’s eyes met. Davis said: ‘I’ve no idea at all. But no doubt I’ll find out, before the day is over.’

For a moment they stood together, without speaking, and Sean had a sense that they could have said much more, in another place or time. Then Sean and Collins moved quietly to the back of the crowd, and watched, until at last the detectives came out, bringing their one prisoner.

He was a man neither Sean Brennan nor Michael Collins had ever seen before.

18. A Careful Typist

R
ADFORD CAME into the front room in Brendan Road behind Kee, and shut the door behind him. He was hot, breathing heavily.

‘Damn!’ he said. ‘Damn them all to perdition! They got away!’

‘All except this one,’ Kee said.

Radford glared at Kee, and the handcuffed figure of Andrew Butler. He said: ‘They all got away, Tom. Every last one of them. He’s one of ours.’

‘What?’ Kee was appalled. ‘In here, and you didn’t tell me? I could have …’

‘Shut up, Tom. Not now, please. I’ve got to think.’ He looked at Andrew. ‘What happened? Was Collins here?’

Andrew began to shake his head, then stopped because of the pain. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Never came.’

‘Why not?’

‘How the hell should I know?’ Andrew felt himself trembling with frustration and rage. ‘Ask this big oaf here - perhaps he scared him off, walking down the middle of the street!’

‘That’s enough of that!’ Radford snapped. ‘Do they know who you are?’

‘Not unless you’ve told them. Or he did.’ Andrew tried to get a grip on himself, realizing that Radford was trying to salvage what he could from the fiasco. At least he had had the sense to shut the door, to keep the others out. But what did it matter now?

Radford turned to Kee. ‘Look, Tom, as far as you’re concerned, this man is a German officer, right? He’s an important catch. Keep him handcuffed and take him to HQ. Only you and I are to interview him. Got that?’

‘Got it,’ Kee said. ‘But I wish you’d told me.’

‘Just get him outside, Tom, will you?’ Radford answered. ‘I’ll explain later. I want to search this place first.’

He opened the door and went out.

‘Come on, then, Hermann,’ said Kee. ‘On your feet. German officer, eh?’ He hauled Andrew out of the front door, and dragged him past the sullen, muttering crowd to where Davis and his driver stood by their car.

‘
Scheisskopf,’
Andrew said, for their benefit.

Standing quietly with his bicycle, Sean Brennan saw the two men coming towards him, and recognized one as the detective who had chased him in the church. He drew his cap down over his eyes, and stepped slowly to the back of the crowd.

But Michael Collins stood quite calmly, looking for all the world like a bank clerk who has never seen anything so exciting in all his life.

Later that evening, Andrew and Radford sat together in an interview room in the cellars of Brunswick Street. It was a cold stone room with nothing on the walls. It contained two upright chairs and a table. Radford held out a sheet of paper.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘There’s your cover note.’

Andrew read it slowly.

Acting on information received, detectives of the DMP G Division raided a private house in Brendan Road this afternoon. In the house the officers found a number of men, whom they believe to be members of the Irish Republican Army responsible for several recent outrages, including the attempted assassination of Lord French at Ashtown Cross. Unfortunately, the men were apparently warned of the raid a few minutes before it happened, and, after a fierce interchange in which a number of shots were fired, all but one managed to make their escape through the back garden.

The police did, however, arrest one occupant of the house - a former German Army officer, whom they believe to be in Dublin with the aim of selling arms to the Sinn Feiners. The German has been taken to Dublin Castle for interrogation, and he will either be tried under the Defence of the Realm Act or deported within the next few days. Lord French is prepared to issue the strongest possible protest to the government in Berlin.

Andrew tossed it back. ‘You’ll release this to the press?’

‘That’s right. It looks good for us. A small propaganda triumph, even if we did miss Collins himself. And the beauty of it is, the Sinn Feiners may protest, but for once they know it’s really true. They
were
trying to buy arms from a German officer. Or at least they think they were.’

Andrew’s lips tightened. He rubbed the back of his head irritably, trying to mask the pain. It was a long time since he had felt such a sense of waste, of anticlimax. ‘I didn’t get into this to make propaganda points,’ he said.

Radford sighed. ‘Nor did I. But it’s the best we can do, just now. Why do you think he didn’t turn up, anyway ?’

‘If I knew that, I’d know everything.’ Andrew pushed his chair back, and stood up. ‘I’ve been round and round it in my mind, but I can see no purpose in it. Bloody Irish inefficiency, probably. Unless they knew you were coming.’

Radford flushed. ‘I’ve told you twice already, haven’t I? No one knew - no one at all - until after you were in that building. That’s why we made such a botch of the raid; I hadn’t time to get the lads in place. It makes us all look stupid, leaving the back door unguarded. But they couldn’t have known – I’ll swear it on anything you like!’

Andrew gazed back at him in silence, cold, dispassionate, with that air of distant unconcern which had always irritated Radford about the aristocracy. In the end he said: ‘All right, I believe you. But from now on, operations with the police are a dead duck. When are you going to let me out of this place?’

Radford sighed, and stood up. He fished a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket, and clipped one of the bracelets around his own left wrist. ‘Now, if you like,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk you over to Dublin Castle, so the lads can see, and then you can slip out the back door any time you like. That suit you?’

Andrew shrugged. ‘It’ll have to, won’t it?’

Radford fastened the other bracelet round Andrew’s right wrist, and unlocked the cell door.

Not for the first time that evening, Detective Constable Dick Davis stopped typing, and scowled at the filing cabinet in the corner of his office. There was something missing from this report which he was typing out, and he didn’t understand why.

Nearly all confidential reports in G Division - those which could not be entrusted to female secretaries - were handwritten first, and then given to Davis to type. This was partly because he was simply more proficient than anyone else with a typewriter, and partly because, unlike everyone else, he didn’t seem to mind using one. As a result he had a highly developed sense of what such a report should include, because he had read them all, word by word.

This report, compiled jointly by Radford and Kee, was very detailed about the events during the raid on the house in Brendan Road, the way the suspects had escaped out of the back garden, and the files, guns, and paperwork that had been found. It did not, so far, include a report of the interrogation of the German officer who had been arrested, but no doubt that would follow in due course. Davis had seen Radford escorting the man over to Dublin Castle a couple of hours ago. He had hoped he might be involved in the interrogation himself, but it seemed that Radford and Kee were keeping that task to themselves.

But the thing which puzzled Davis most was how Radford had found out about Brendan Road in the first place.

It was a vital piece of information, and it was simply missing from the report.
‘Acting on information received’
, it said, and that was all. For the twelfth time that night, Davis sat back in his chair, picked up his cigarette, and blew a cloud of foul-smelling smoke at the grey filing cabinet. Information received by whom? By Radford himself, it seemed. And anyone else? Davis doubted it. Even Radford’s Ulster confederate, Tom Kee, had seemed in the dark this morning. Kee had tried to hide it, but it was Davis’s impression that he was pretty annoyed. So either Kee was a consummate actor, or he had been frozen out.

Why? To this there was an obvious answer, and it was one which sent a chill through Davis’s bloodstream. Radford didn’t dare share his information with anyone, because he was afraid it was being passed on to the IRA. Davis smoothed the paper in his typewriter thoughtfully, making sure that the extra carbon - the one for Michael Collins - was in line with the others.

I should really finish this report soon, he thought, before that beggar comes back and starts checking up on me. Because if he’s afraid that information is being passed to the IRA, his next move is going to be to find out who’s doing the passing.

Radford’s an Ulsterman, for heaven’s sake, Davis thought; he’d hardly been in this city until two months ago. He doesn’t know the difference between Donnybrook and Drumcondra. Who’s he been in touch with?

It has to be someone within the movement itself, he decided. And that, to Davis, was the most frightening thought of all. Because if someone within the republican movement was passing on high-quality information to Radford, then there was no knowing what that information might contain. It might contain, for instance, the name of the detective in G Division who was working for the IRA. The informer might even come across one of the flimsy carbons from Davis’s typewriter in the republicans’ files, and show it to Radford. It would be easy enough to check which typewriter the report had been typed on - each machine had its own distinctive faults in the way the letters came out on the page.

The informer might even have heard of the time when Michael Collins had been spirited into Brunswick Square itself, and sat all night at the desk of Radford’s predecessor, reading through the files which Davis brought him. At the time, Davis had thought it his proudest moment, but he was not particularly anxious to explain his pride to a British judge, or to spend the next ten years remembering it in a cell. They would probably send him to a prison in England, Davis thought. English prison officers did not like Irish republicans, or bent police officers.

He shivered, and looked round to see if someone was coming in, or if the window had been opened. No. The building was quiet, as it usually was in the early part of the evening.

I’m getting jumpy, he thought. Time to finish this report. I need a drink, a bite to eat and a breath of fresh air.

He stubbed out his cigarette, and for ten more minutes his fingers hammered hard on the keys.

But as he unwound the completed report from the machine, he thought: Wherever he gets his information from, that man Radford is becoming a menace.

He’ll have to go.

19. Society Hostess

S
IR JONATHAN was pleased with the afternoon at the races. It had been one of those fine, crisp days that come sometimes in midwinter, when the sky clears, the sun shines down out of a blue sky, and for a few hours everyone can unbutton their topcoats and remember what it can be like in summer. The atmosphere consoled him a little after the fiasco of Andrew Butler’s failure, which he had learnt about the previous night.

To his delight, Catherine gave at least an appearance of enjoying herself. She had been a lover of horses since she could walk, and as they paraded in the paddock she gazed at their silken, gleaming flanks with close attention. In the twelve thirty she had picked an outsider,
Scheherazade,
who had come in by a short head at fifteen to one; and from then on her advice had been sought on all sides. Colonel Roberts and his wife, who had just come over from England, were delighted, as was MacQuarry, a tall, thin Scotsman who worked in the official solicitor’s department at Dublin Castle.

The young men were less of a success, so far. MacQuarry’s son, David, the heir to several Highland grouse moors and trout streams, had even turned up with a young lady of his own, who looked likely to become his fiancée at any moment. The other, Simon le Fanu, a short, powerfully built captain in the Inniskillings, seemed so uncharacteristically pale and morose that Sir Jonathan wondered if he was ill.

Sir Jonathan stood beside him as they took their places in the stand for the penultimate race in the day, the three o’clock. It was a novice handicap over a mile and two furlongs, once round the course.

‘Have you got any money on this, young Simon?’ he asked.

The young man shrugged. ‘A couple of quid on
Shangri-La
, for the name. But I’ve no idea really.’

Sir Jonathan grunted, offended by the lack of enthusiasm. In his opinion racing could be enjoyed only if pursued with passion, even by those without knowledge. He considered the scene around him, still lit by the declining rays of a sun which shone miraculously out of a clear blue western sky. What he knew about young Simon could be summed up in five facts: he had served for two years in Flanders; he had been wounded; he had won the Military Cross; he was the heir to 5,000 acres in west Meath; and he was unmarried. All of these, so far as Sir Jonathan was concerned, were positive recommendations.

He tried a different tack. He said: ‘There was a time, eighteen months ago, when I thought I’d never see a sight like this again. I dare say you felt the same, eh?’

Simon shivered. ‘True enough. The nearest we got to it was when some troopers organized a racecourse for the rats, along the duckboards in a communication trench. They used to shoot them as they came through the finishing post.’

Sir Jonathan laughed. ‘Never keep an Irishman from a bet, eh? If you put some of these fellows in a hole in the ground, they’d bet on something.’

‘That’s what we did, didn’t we?’ said Simon. ‘They kept a book on the new recruits, once, till I put a stop to it. Two to one they wouldn’t last a fortnight.’

‘My God,’ said Sir Jonathan, horrified. ‘Hardly cricket, that. Court-martialling offence, I should think. Was there a charge?’

‘No.’ Simon did not elaborate, and in a moment the excitement of the race was upon them, and the story forgotten. Only much later, when they had returned to Merrion Square, and the butler, Keneally, was carrying round a tray of drinks in the main drawing room, did Sir Jonathan think of it again. He noticed le Fanu standing politely by himself on the edge of the hearth, took his daughter firmly by the arm, and steered her across the room.