MICHAEL RUSSELL
The City of Strangers

For

Anya, Seren, Finn, Coinneach and Marta

And the Silver Meteor

To the Pennsylvania Station

Send but a song oversea for us,

Heart of their hearts who are free,

Heart of their singer to be for us

More than our singing can be.

‘To Walt Whitman in America’

Algernon Charles Swinburne

RPACN FEBSA HOGYH VTNOY IKSAO RYHOI VAUAR OAOIR OKWGQ MWAYA IERIL IETTM NNSTN ATAUA OIETH ARGTR YLHRA NASRI FOOAA AIALL TINYN LMENV NOOYG EEHOS OAOET GECTN: List of spies noted. Am forwarding it to Intelligence Director for his information. Are you able to carry out annihilation of all spies?

From Decoding the IRA

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One: Uptown

1. Pallas Strand

2. Fulton Market

3. Kilranelagh

4. Corbawn Lane

5. Inns Quay

6. West Thirty-Sixth Street

7. The Yankee Clipper

8. Fifty-Second Street

9. Centre Street

10. Pennsylvania Six-Five-Thousand

11. Fifth Avenue

12. The Hampshire House

Part Two: Upstate

13. Locust Valley

14. Central Park

15. Flushing Meadows

16. A Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street

17. The Waldorf-Astoria

18. Route Eleven

19. Mexico Bay

20. The Empire State

21. A Hundred and Sixteenth Street

22. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral

Part Three: Upstroke

23. Dún Laoghaire

24. Béarra

25. The Four Courts

26. Henrietta Street

27. Reilig Chill Rannaireach

28. Royal Oak

War and the Rumour of War

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Michael Russell

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE
Uptown

Mrs Leticia Harris, aged 53, who resided at 14 Herbert Place, Dublin, disappeared some time after 6 a.m. on Sunday, 8 th March. The following morning her car was discovered at premises in Corbawn Lane, leading from Shankill to the sea. There were numerous bloodstains inside the car, and the police later in the day found a bloodstained hatchet in a shed adjoining her house, and also bloodstains on the flower borders in the garden. The police theory is that Mrs Harris was murdered in her own home and the body taken away in her car. Mrs Harris is the wife of Dr Cecil Wingfield Harris, 81 Pembroke Road, Dublin.

The Irish Times

1. Pallas Strand
West Cork, November 1922

The storm did not come suddenly. All day the wind from the Atlantic had blown hard and cold and fast against Pallas Strand. The grey sky sped past overhead, heavy, thick, turbulent. The noise was unceasing, humming and roaring, loud and soft, and loud and soft again, but always there, along with the beat of the sea crashing endlessly against the white curve of sand. The farm lay back from the strand, behind a scattering of tufted dunes and a row of wasted trees, bent and twisted from long years of bowing and creaking before the wind, yet somehow always strong enough to stand. Indoors and out the blast of the wind battering the farmyard and the buildings had been constant, but still the rain hadn’t come.

The boy was in the yard, leaning into the wind to stand, scattering leftovers from a bucket to the ruffled and bad-tempered hens. He was seven; it had been his birthday only a week ago. He shouted and laughed as the puppy that had been his birthday present danced around him, darting and leaping, behind, in front, through his legs, trying to snatch the bacon rinds before the hens could get them. His father was in the barn, milking the three black cows. His mother was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. He didn’t hear the two vehicles driving along the track from the main road. The wind was blowing the sound away from him. It was only as the dog turned sharply from the scraps and started to bark that he saw them.

He knew them well enough. The long, sleek Crossley Tourer came first, with its top open even in the wind, and its battered leather seats. He loved the Tourer and its white-walled tyres, despite the men inside it. The other one was different; a Rolls Royce armoured car with its squat turret on the back and its .303 Vickers machine gun sticking out through the letter-box sights. As the dog zigzagged angrily round the wheels of the Crossley, snapping and snarling, it stopped; three uniformed men got out. The boy knew them too. It wasn’t the first time they had driven into the farmyard at Pallas Strand.

There was a young lieutenant and two great-coated Free State soldiers. The lieutenant smiled; the boy didn’t smile back. No one got out of the armoured car; its turret moved in a slow, grating arc as the machine gun scanned the yard. The puppy kept up a furious yapping, now round the feet of the intruders, but a kick sent him flying across the muddy yard. The boy turned to find his father standing behind him. There was another man too, his uncle. Where his father was calm and steady, he could see the fear in the other man’s eyes. And his mother was there now, in the doorway of the house, wiping her hands dry with her apron. The lieutenant stepped towards the boy’s father.

‘You’ve heard what happened on the Kenmare road?’

‘I heard something.’

‘So where were you yesterday?’

‘I was here. Where else would I be?’

‘You were seen in Kenmare the day before, with Ted Sullivan.’

‘Who says?’

‘I do.’

The boy’s father shrugged.

‘There’s a Garda sergeant dead at Derrylough. A mine,’ said the officer.

The boy’s father shrugged again.

‘Someone said something about it.’

‘There was no mine on Tuesday. The road was clear.’

‘I wouldn’t know, Lieutenant. That’ll be your business.’

‘But Ted Sullivan would know, I’d say.’

‘That’ll be his business then. You’d need to ask him so.’

‘Maybe you’d know where he is then?’

‘Well, he wouldn’t always be easy to find.’

‘Unless you were an IRA man.’

‘There’d be a lot of IRA men in West Cork. You’d know yourself. And it’s not so long ago you fellers would have called yourselves IRA men.’

The boy’s father smiled. It was a mixture of amusement and contempt. It was a familiar conversation, empty, circular, quietly insolent; all the lieutenant’s questions would go unanswered. But he knew that. He turned to one of the soldiers and nodded. The man walked forward and slammed the butt of his rifle into the farmer’s stomach. As he collapsed to the ground the boy stepped between his father and the soldier, saying nothing, but glaring hatred and defiance. The soldier laughed. The boy’s mother ran forward across the yard, but her husband was already struggling to his feet. He looked at her sharply and shook his head. She stopped immediately. The boy turned to his father. The noise of the wind rose and blasted. The man smiled, despite his pain, and put his hand on his son’s head, ruffling his hair. The lieutenant put a cigarette in his mouth. He hunched over his hands for several seconds, trying to get his lighter to catch it. After a moment he straightened up, drawing on the smoke.

‘Let’s see what you’ve got to say at the barracks.’

The soldier who had knocked the boy’s father down took his arm and dragged him towards the Crossley Tourer. The other soldier covered him with his rifle. The turret of the armoured car creaked slowly as the machine gun swept round the farmyard once more. The boy watched as his father was pushed into the back seat of the car. Neither his mother nor his uncle moved. They had seen it before; it was always the same; the same questions and no answers. He would come back, beaten and bruised, but he would come back. The soldiers got into the car. Then the Crossley Tourer and the armoured car swept round in a circle in the farmyard, through the mud and the dung, and drove up the track towards the road to Castleberehaven, the dog chasing behind, still barking and snapping.

The woman walked forward. She took her son’s hand and smiled reassuringly. It would be all right. These were the things they lived with, that they had always lived with. Even at seven years old he was meant to understand that. The soldiers who had taken his father away were traitors; men who had sold the fight for Irish freedom for a half-arsed treaty with England that was barely freedom at all. Traitors were to be treated with contempt, not fear. Then his mother turned to his uncle, his face white, his fists clenched tight at his side. The fear was gone; now his face was full of anger.

The boy had once asked his mother why his father seemed to have no fear and his uncle, sometimes, had to hide his shaking hands. ‘A man can only give what he has,’ she told him. ‘If he gives it all, no one can ask more than that.’ She was very calm now. None of it was new to them. Three years ago it had been the English Black and Tans; now the men in uniform were Irish, but the same sort of shite. Rage was to be nurtured, as it had been for centuries. There would always be a time to use it.

‘You take the bike and go up to Horan’s. They’ll get a message to Brigadier Sullivan. He’d better know. And we’ll finish milking the cows.’

The boy’s uncle nodded and walked quickly away. The woman and the boy went into the barn. For a moment, as his mother put her arm round him and squeezed, the boy smiled again. He did know it would be all right.

They waited all that evening, wife and brother and son. The rain had finally come just before dark, beating in from the sea, and the wind began to drop. As night fell a more welcome car pulled into the farmyard. The IRA brigadier said the man was where they expected him to be, in the police barracks in Castleberehaven, on the other side of the peninsula. The Crossley Tourer had been seen driving in through the gates around four o’clock. The IRA had someone inside the barracks; when the man was released they’d have the information immediately. He would be collected and brought home. The Free Staters had pulled in a number of volunteers that afternoon; it was the usual game; most of the men were already home. They only had to wait.

When the boy went up to bed there was no sense of anxiety in the house. The rain was falling outside, but the storm was quiet. Lying in his bedroom under the eaves, listening to the rain rattling comfortably on the roof, he drifted off to sleep thinking of the days when he would hold a rifle in his hand and fight the fight his family fought now. But when he woke abruptly in the early hours of the morning, he knew something was wrong. The rain still fell, but the house wasn’t at its ease any more. He could hear voices downstairs; his mother’s, his uncle’s, and others, a woman, several men. He could make out no words, but the voices no longer echoed the assured tones of the brigadier. There was anxiety; he knew what that was. The voices grew louder and then someone said something to quieten them; but the quiet wasn’t really quiet; it was a series of harsh, adult whispers that only intensified the anxiety.

He got out of bed and crept across the room. He knew where each floorboard creaked; he stepped slowly and carefully. At the door he turned the knob and opened it just a crack. The lamps were still burning downstairs. He didn’t know the time, but he knew these were the early hours of the morning. The voices were still unclear. The broken words and overlapping phrases that came up the stairs wouldn’t fit together. ‘Five fucking hours ago – they drove him out, he was in the car – it was ten o’clock – no, the ones at Ardgroom were from Kenmare – Gerry Curran didn’t even pick up a gun – they pulled him out of bed – they already knew where the explosives was buried – so where is he?’

The voices stopped. People were moving downstairs. The door into the farmyard opened. The boy tiptoed to the window. He pulled back the curtain and looked down. Two men were walking across the farmyard. They carried rifles. His uncle followed, a few steps behind; he stopped and turned back to the house. His mother was there now, standing in the rain. His uncle stepped back. He put his arm round her and pulled her to him. It was the same gesture of reassurance the boy had received from his mother as they walked to the barn to milk the cows, but everything about the way his mother stood now, unmoving, unaware of the rain falling on her, said that she wasn’t reassured.

His uncle picked up the bicycle that lay on the ground by the door. He got on it and rode away. Ahead of him the two other men were on bicycles too, their rifles slung over their backs, their hats pulled down on their heads. The three of them rode out of the farmyard and within seconds the rain and the darkness had swallowed them. The light from the open door shone on his mother as she watched them go. The boy looked down from the bedroom window. It seemed a long time before she turned away from the darkness, back into the house. The door shut. She did not come upstairs.

He let the curtain fall back across the window. He stood in the dark room. He could hear no sound from the kitchen below, but somehow he knew that his mother was standing, just as he was, and that she was crying, just as he was. He could feel the tears now. He understood nothing, except that there were reasons for tears, and reasons to be afraid. He walked to his bed and knelt. He crossed himself and clasped his hands together, closing his eyes tightly. ‘Holy Mary, be a mother to me. May the Blessed Virgin Mary, St Joseph, and all the saints in heaven pray for us to the Lord, that we may be preserved this night from sin and evil. Good Angel, that God has appointed my guardian, watch over my Daddy and protect him from harm.’

The rain stopped very suddenly, just before dawn. The sun had been up for over an hour when the boy woke. He wasn’t in his bed. He was sprawled across it where he had finally fallen asleep in the middle of the prayers he had repeated over and over again. He got up and walked to the window to pull back the curtains.

The sun was low in the sky but the morning was clear and bright already. Outside he could hear the familiar sounds of the cows in the barn, waiting to be fed and milked. The cockerel called across the farmyard, loud and urgent. But the only other noise was the shrill sound of gulls, flocking overhead. It was a moment before the anxiety of the previous night pushed the morning aside, and he remembered.

He ran to the door and downstairs. There was no one in the kitchen. The door to the farmyard was open. The door to the sitting room was open too, but there was no one there. He ran back upstairs and burst into his mother and father’s bedroom. It was empty; the bed had not been slept in. He knocked on the door to his uncle’s room across the landing, then opened it; it was empty too and the bed was unused. He raced down the stairs again. He put his raincoat on over his pyjamas and pulled on his boots.

The farmyard was empty. He stood outside and looked around him. It was as if everyone he loved had simply disappeared; for a moment it was bewildering rather than frightening. But he knew the emptiness around him meant that the darkness of the night had not been swept away by the dawn. He looked at the sky. The noise of the gulls was very loud now. A great crowd of them rose and fell on currents of air over the sea beyond the dunes, tightly bunched, angry somehow.

He ran towards the sound, through the farmyard, past the haystacks, on to the track through the dune field, up on to the tussocky dunes. He stopped, looking out at Pallas Strand and the sea, and the crowd of people, away at the far end of the beach, where the gulls were flocking and diving and screeching overhead.

He ran towards the crowd; twenty-five, thirty people in a loose group. Some stood silently, looking towards the sea, away from something. Some stood with their heads bowed in prayer. Some were simply staring down at the sand. No one seemed to see him coming. As he reached the crowd and pushed through the onlookers, still none of them seemed to notice him.

His father’s head and shoulders rose out of the sand of Pallas Strand.

He had been buried up to his chest; his hands were by his side, somewhere beneath the sand. His head was facing out towards the sea. And where his eyes had been there were two pits of black and red pus.

The boy stared, not able to understand what he was looking at. It wasn’t real; it wasn’t a real thing at all. The first thing that came into his head was the face of the vampire he had seen at the cinema in Castleberehaven, when he had crept in at the back with Danny Mullins during Nosferatu a month ago; they had watched in open-mouthed awe, for all of five minutes, before they were yanked out by the ears. But he knew what he was looking at, of course he knew. And then it was gone. His uncle’s coat dropped over the head and covered it, and suddenly, as if a still photograph had sprung to life, everyone saw him.

His mother turned and came towards him. He didn’t see her; he was still staring down at the sand and the coat that covered his father’s head. She pulled him to her, standing between him and his father’s body, folding him in her arms before she pulled him away. He didn’t resist as she led him back towards the farm.

He didn’t even try to look back.

No one would let him look at his father’s face again. On the day of the removal, when the coffin rested all day in the farm’s best room and friends and neighbours walked from all around to drink tea and shake his hand, his mother’s hand, his uncle’s hand, the coffin would be shut. But in reality he would always see it; the black tears of blood on the wet cheeks. And as he walked silently along the strand with his mother now, the gulls were still screaming and baying for the feast they had been driven away from.

His father had died a hero. But life had to continue; there was a farm. Yet down the years of growing up in the farm behind Pallas Strand, he saw his father’s face whenever he heard the sound of hungry gulls. And though he had been told a thousand times that his father was already dead when the Free State soldiers buried him there, as a reprisal for the dead Free State sergeant at Derrylough, and as a brutal warning, he would still wake at night in terror, from dreams in which he couldn’t move his body, his legs, his arms, and he felt himself gazing helplessly at the waves moving towards him across Pallas Strand, where no one could hear his screams over the wind roaring in the darkness.

Grief would be softened as the years went by, but not rage. It was a secret strength. Rage had to be nurtured; there was a time to use it.

2. Fulton Market
New York, March 1939

In the Fulton Fish Market, below the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side of the East River, an Irishman was sitting at a coffee stall. He was a little over forty; tall, fair, with a little bit more weight than was entirely good for him. It was eleven o’clock in the evening and the place was gearing up for the night, as it did every night, its busiest time. It was as cold inside as it was outside. Lights shone fiercely over the stalls stretched out in every direction, but wind from the East River blew in through the open doors, and the crushed ice that was everywhere made it even colder. Fish was still arriving, in boxes and baskets, carried by porters and piled high on the forklift trucks that raced along the market aisles, blasting horns.

The air reeked of blood and the sea; the floor swam with melting ice and fish guts; the occasional live eel squirmed between the stalls, struggling for the doors and the smell of the East River beyond. The price of fish was shouted out with competing, overlapping cries that echoed endlessly round the building. The prices were called in English, but the profanities that accompanied them were in all the languages of New York: English, German, Yiddish, Italian, Greek, Chinese, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Armenian; like the varieties of fish, no one could count them all.

Captain John Cavendish, of the Irish army, Óglaigh na hÉireann, had been in New York for the last two months as an advisor on security during the construction of the Irish Pavilion at the World’s Fair, across the river in Long Island’s Flushing Meadows. He had also spent some of his time talking to the American army about weapons and training and munitions, and was compiling a report on all this to take back to Ireland. As far as both the ambassador in Washington and the consul general in New York were concerned, his previous role as an officer in Military Intelligence, G2, had nothing whatsoever to do with his presence in America. The fact that he was in New York at all, where the current IRA bombing campaign against Britain, now in full if ineffective swing, had been largely planned and financed, was no more than a coincidence.

It was a coincidence too that he was in New York while the IRA’s chief of staff was in America, selling not only the new war against the old enemy, but the idea that the bigger war that had to come, sooner or later, between Britain and Germany, would bring the IRA back to a position of power in Ireland itself. It would be a war that would chase England out of the corner of Ireland it still held on to; it would put an end to the toadying Free State that had found the temerity, under the leadership of the Republican turncoat Éamon de Valera, to almost call itself a ‘republic’; and it would reunite the island of Ireland.

Captain Cavendish perched on a stool at the coffee stall counter. He wore a dark grey lounge suit, a blue shirt, a silver tie, a navy blue overcoat and a pale grey fedora. He should have looked out of place among the porters and stallholders in Fulton Market, but nobody took any notice. The man he was chatting amiably to at the counter ought to have looked equally out of place, in a black cashmere overcoat and a black homburg, a half-smoked cigar clamped between his teeth. But men in overcoats and hats were no strangers to the market in the middle of the night; it was run by the Mob, after all, and the men in overcoats took a cut on every box of fish that came in and went out.

The man John Cavendish was talking to carried a .38 under his jacket, and he was important enough that the man in the brown homburg who had come into the market with him, and was now helping himself to boiled shrimps from the next stall, carried a .45 to make sure his boss had no need to use his .38. The man in the black homburg raised his hat to the captain and walked away, followed by his protection. He had a word for every stallholder he passed; the replies all contained the word ‘mister’.

John Cavendish looked at his watch; the man he was meeting was late. He had a good idea why and he didn’t much like it. But he had no choice but to wait. The army officer held out his empty coffee cup for a refill. And he liked the market. It was an old building that offered relief from the streets of towers and skyscrapers that stretched through Manhattan. It was a manageable place. It reminded him of the South City Markets in Dublin; it had the same red brick, the same arched windows, the same broken gabled lights in the roof, the same vaulting interior and battered, shabby, workaday appearance. Living in the future, as he had been told he was many times since arriving in New York, he liked to touch the past.

The man he was waiting for had docked at Pier 17 on the Hudson River two hours earlier. There were piers by Fulton Market too, but there were no grand Atlantic liners there, only the fishing boats from Long Island and New England, and the ferries to Brooklyn. Donal Redmond’s ship was the French Line’s SS Normandie; he was a steward. He would have picked up the message he was delivering, as he always did, when the boat stopped at Cobh on its way from Le Havre to New York. And before the delivery was made at the other end he would give it to John Cavendish to copy.

‘You’re late.’

‘I’m here, what else do you want?’

‘You’d be better off out of the White Horse every time you dock.’

‘If I didn’t have a few in there, they’d think something was up.’

‘You’ve had more than a few.’

‘I’ve been on that boat six fucking days. What do you care?’

‘I don’t,’ said Cavendish, getting up off the stool. ‘Have you got it?’

Donal Redmond nodded. He followed the army officer through the maze of stalls, out to the back of the market, where the boxes of fish were loading and unloading. Trucks and cars, horses and carts, barrows and forklifts were everywhere. Money was changing hands outside as it was in, and arguments were still going on about prices that had started at the stalls and carried on out to the street; hands were spat on and shaken; illegible dockets and receipts were scrawled out and dropped into the slush of ice and blood and litter.

John Cavendish sat with the steward in the front of his red and white Crossley. In all the noise and the constant movement of vehicles a man scribbling something down in the front of a car looked like any other wholesaler or restaurateur totting up his bill.

The two letters, on thin copy-paper flimsies, had been rolled up tightly into straws and buried in a tin of Jacob’s shortbread biscuits. On each of the two pages were several paragraphs of typed capital letters; the letters grouped in neat columns, each five letters wide, with a space between each group. Cavendish copied both pages, laying the letters out exactly as in the typed originals. He rolled up the pages as tightly as they had emerged from the tin, then twisted the top and bottom of each one. The other man pushed them back under the biscuits, pressed the lid down tightly, and turned to stuff the tin into the duffel bag that was now on the back seat of the captain’s car.

‘Do you want a lift over to Queens?’

‘OK. Suits me.’

John Cavendish took five ten dollar bills from his wallet and handed them over. The steward put them in his pocket and grinned. It was done.

‘Merci, mon brave. Quelque chose à boire?’

Cavendish reached under the dashboard and pulled out a silver and leather hip flask. As he started the engine he handed it to Donal Redmond. He drove from Front Street on to Fulton Street, past City Hall and up on to the Brooklyn Bridge, over the East River to Long Island. He drove through Brooklyn into Queens. Redmond said nothing now; their business was over. Two blocks from the call house in Woodside, at the corner of 58th Street and 37th Avenue, where the ciphers would be delivered, the army officer stopped the car. The steward got out, hauled his duffel bag from the back seat and walked away.

As he disappeared from sight Cavendish reached for the hip flask and drank the remaining whiskey; as he put his hands back on the steering wheel he realised they were shaking. He pulled out into the road. A horn blasted angrily. The Irishman smiled to himself and tutted, ‘Cavendish, Cavendish!’ He drove on. He’d said he’d meet her an hour ago. He was heading for La Guardia now, for the Triborough Bridge, and then Harlem.

It was one o’clock in the morning in Small’s Paradise on 7th Avenue and 135th. It was hot, however cold it was outside. The downtown whites with the appetite for it had left the restaurants and bars of Lower Manhattan to join the black crowds in Harlem now, where the music was always louder but more importantly always better, much better, and you could dance with a woman in ways that would have got you thrown out of the Rainbow Room for even thinking about. The mix of black and white customers was a natural thing in Small’s; it was natural enough that nobody thought very much about it; Ed Small was black after all. There were white-owned, Jim Crow Harlem clubs, like the Cotton Club, where only the waiters and the musicians were black. But there were black clubs and black clubs of course; Small’s Paradise was just about as black as Manhattan’s more adventurous white downtowners and midtowners could comfortably cope with.

John Cavendish was happy enough to be there for the music, which he had grown to love during his months in New York. He’d heard a lot of it now and he never tired of hearing more. It was like nothing he’d known, and whatever he’d heard before, on records or the radio, was only the palest reflection of what it felt like to be in a room with it. He was easy there; he would have been happy just to listen.

The Irish woman he was with, Kate O’Donnell, was maybe thirty, tall, with blue eyes that had the habit of always looking slightly puzzled. Her hair was cut just above her shoulders, blonde enough not to need bleaching, and with enough curl not to need perming; sometimes she even brushed it, but not so often that it looked brushed. She was dressed well, but if you’d asked her what she had on, she would have had to check. She wasn’t easy sitting there. There was an edge of anxiety about her. She needed one of the trumpeters in the band with her when she talked to John Cavendish tonight.

If the captain was going to help her, she wanted him to help her now. She had started to feel he was putting it on the long finger. They needed to talk harder again; the captain, her, the trumpeter; they needed to move.

But talking to the trumpeter wasn’t the only reason they were there at Small’s Paradise. It was safe, safer than anywhere else. Harlem was the right side of Central Park, that’s to say the wrong side; it was nobody’s territory, at least nobody she knew, nobody who mattered.

The black trumpeter was playing now, standing up for a short, final solo as the band came to the end of ‘Caravan’. Cavendish knew it; he’d been at Small’s once before when Duke Ellington was playing. He liked swing; it was the sound he heard everywhere in New York. But the man at the piano, with the immaculately slicked hair and the faintest pencil-line moustache, went further than swing. What he played wasn’t just music, it was the city itself; it was as delicate and ephemeral as it was hard and sharp and solid. The piano was the night air in Central Park one moment and a subway train the next. As the trumpeter sat down to a scattering of applause, the piano and the brushed cymbals took over. Cavendish took an envelope from his pocket and pushed it across the table to Kate. The music was louder again now as the band played the last, almost harmonious chord, and the whole club focused on Ellington and his musicians, clapping and shouting.

‘That’s the passport I promised,’ said Cavendish. ‘Two. If she needs to travel under another name, there’s not much point you travelling under yours. It’s unlikely she’ll want it going into Canada, but with what’s going on at the moment you don’t need a problem.’

Kate picked up her handbag and put the envelope in it.

‘My problem right now is she’s still there, locked up in that place.’

The set had finished now, and the fading applause followed Ellington and his band off the stage. Another musician made his way to the piano and started to play, more quietly. Dancers drifted off the floor; the volume of conversation grew; trays of food and drink were coming at greater speed.

Jimmy Palmer, the trumpeter, pushed his way through the milling customers and waiters and cigarette girls, and sat down at the table with Kate O’Donnell and John Cavendish without saying a word. He lit a cigarette.

‘So where are we, Kate?’ he asked.

‘John’s at the Canadian border. I haven’t got her off Long Island.’

She smiled as she said it, but it wasn’t a joke.

‘You really think he’s going to come after her?’ said Cavendish.

‘We’ve been having this conversation for a month, John.’ Kate was tired repeating herself. ‘You’ve talked about helping us, and then you’ve talked about helping us, then you’ve talked about it a bit more. He won’t let her just go. How many times do I have to say it? She wouldn’t be there in the first place if he was happy to let her go. If you’re not going to do it –’

Jimmy Palmer just drew on his cigarette and watched.

‘I need to be sure how careful we need to be, once we get her out of New York,’ the army officer continued. ‘The answer’s still very. So you get her away from Locust Valley and I’ll make sure you cross into Canada. I’m not trying to find a way out of it.’ He took out a cigarette himself now; he caught the eye of a waiter and gestured for another round of drinks. ‘I’ve said I’ll use my car. There’s not going to be anybody around to make a connection between you and an Irishman taking a little trip upstate –’

‘I can get a car.’ It was Jimmy who spoke now. ‘I can do the trip.’

Kate smiled, reaching out her hand fondly to take his. He spoke with determination. It mattered to him in the same way it mattered to her. It was different for Cavendish; of course it was. He was there for what he could get. But he was the one they needed. He had the false passports.

‘I know, Jimmy. But there’s too many connections already. He knows you too. Anybody he sends after Niamh is going to know you. And people are going to notice a black man driving two white women around upstate.’

‘Poor old Jim Crow, eh?’

He gave a wry smile. It didn’t make the truth any easier. Harlem was his place; he was somebody here. Outside Harlem he wasn’t anybody at all.

‘I guess I know you’re right.’

He shrugged; you couldn’t argue much with how things were.

Kate turned back to Cavendish.

‘I have talked to her. I’ve told her what she has to do. It’s not easy. Once she’s out of there it’ll be different. Once she can breathe. Half the time she’s so doped up she doesn’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know who’s listening either. I am sure she can do it. It’s just getting her to walk out –’

‘That bit’s down to you,’ said the Irishman quietly. ‘When we’re out of New York it should be fine.’ He picked up his drink. ‘But I still need what I need from her. I need her in a state where she can think clearly.’

She nodded. He held her gaze for a moment. Maybe there was a part of him that was doing this because he had started to care now, about Kate and about her sister. But that wasn’t why he was there. And Kate knew it.

‘Niamh does know that. She has got the information.’

There was silence. Kate picked up her drink. She was tense again. Jimmy Palmer looked at them both. Whatever they were talking about didn’t include him.

‘Does know what?’ he said, his eyes on Kate. ‘What’s this about?’

‘It doesn’t matter, Jimmy.’

She was awkward rather than dismissive, but it came across as dismissive anyway. Cavendish wouldn’t want her to talk about any of that.

‘It matters to me. And it sounds like it’s going to matter to Niamh.’

The trumpeter turned to Captain Cavendish again. He didn’t know him. He didn’t know why he was involved, why he was giving out passports and booking liner tickets. He didn’t like the fact that he was taking things over, in ways that weren’t explained, ways that seemed to be about something a lot more than helping Kate O’Donnell and her sister because he was a nice guy. He had only met the captain three times; he didn’t always feel like a nice guy. He watched people too much. ‘So this’ll be some li’l thing the nigger don’t need concern hisself with, that right Massa John?’

‘Come on, Jimmy. It’s nothing of the kind,’ said Cavendish.

‘Maybe this nigger should know about it, Kate,’ snapped Jimmy.

‘He’s not helping us for love,’ said Kate, shaking her head. ‘You must have worked that out. He wants something out of it. You know what Niamh was doing on the boats. You know she wasn’t just any old courier either. Why should the captain do anything for nothing? Why should anybody? He’s a soldier, an Irish soldier. You know what I’m talking about too.’

John Cavendish wasn’t comfortable with what Kate was saying, but he didn’t stop her saying it. He looked across at Jimmy Palmer and nodded.

Jimmy didn’t like it but he could work it out, enough anyway.

‘We can’t do this on our own,’ said Kate. It was all she could offer.

The trumpeter stubbed out his cigarette. The waiter arrived with the fresh drinks and passed them round. Palmer downed his bourbon in one.

‘If there’s a deal, then you do your part, Mr Cavendish. She can’t stay there. And days, not weeks. Kate’s seen her. She can’t take much more.’

‘I’m ready to go.’ John Cavendish looked from Jimmy to Kate.

Jimmy was looking at Kate now too.

She nodded.

Ellington’s band was straggling back on stage.

‘I got the taxi,’ said the horn player, getting up. ‘Just give me the day.’

Kate nodded again. She picked up her drink.

Cavendish raised his and smiled.

Jimmy reached out his hand. John Cavendish shook it.

Kate smiled at them both. It wasn’t much of a smile. She looked tired.

The trumpeter walked back to the stage.

‘Do you want a lift, Kate?’ She shook her head.

‘No, I’ll get a cab.’

‘Sure?’

‘It’s better we’re not seen together outside work.’

She was right.

Suddenly Duke Ellington’s hands hit the piano hard. The drummer crashed the cymbal and top hat. Jimmy Palmer’s horn was loud and liquid.

Outside it was cold. Kate O’Donnell slipped away, with no more than a last smile, a stronger smile now, and hailed a cab. John Cavendish watched her go for a moment, conscious that he had been delaying things. He didn’t know what the consequences would be, that was all. There was no obvious connection to make between a woman escaping from a sanatorium on Long Island, where she was virtually a prisoner, and the IRA’s courier system and its ciphered messages to and from America. But if the IRA was as careful as it ought to be, someone could decide changes were in order anyway, and that might mean his interceptions drying up. He pushed away all that and walked towards 7th Avenue to get his car. It was time to act; a file full of ciphers nobody could read was no use to anybody. He needed Niamh Carroll now.

The night was bright and noisy all around him; car horns, laughter, singing, angry voices, somewhere a saxophone, the rattle of the trains from the el. It was still Ellington’s music, all of it.

At the corner with 7th Avenue there were a few people standing in front of a small black man, not old but with strikingly white hair, who stood on a box speaking. In front of him there was a placard: The Ethiopian Pacific Movement – the Struggle between the New Order and the Old. People drifted by. Some paused, then walked on quickly. The night swept round the white-haired man. John Cavendish did stop, listening to his words. He had seen the man before.

‘You think there’s going to be change while those sonovabitch Jews run things? Even the white man’s starting to listen now. Even the white man’s got someone telling him what’s righteous. You heard of Adolf Hitler? Now, he’s a man got those sonovabitch Jews on the run. When he’s kicked their butts, well, the white man can have Europe, that’s all Hitler wants. He wants us to have our place and whitey to have his. Black place, white place. That’s the world we want. So Herr Hitler is fighting our battle for us. He’s fighting against white democracy, because white democracy is the biggest shit lie the Devil ever put on the earth. And you know what Herr Hitler’s going to do? He’s going to take Africa from the British and give it to the black man. That’s coming brothers, believe me! And we got other friends too, not just Mr Hitler. We got the Japanese now. They want to kick the white man’s ass out of the Pacific, like Hitler will in Africa. They’ll kick it so hard you won’t see a white man or a fucking sonovabitch Jew for dust!’

The words puzzled Cavendish now as they had puzzled him before, but the light of truth shone in the black man’s eyes. He was looking at Cavendish, with a slight smile, only now registering his only listener. The captain smiled back amiably, pulled his hat on tighter, and walked off.

*

When Donal Redmond left John Cavendish’s car in Queens he had walked two blocks to Lennon’s Bar, the call house where the messages he brought from Ireland were dropped. He walked in through the bar, nodding to the barman and the two or three customers who were there, and headed straight for the back room. He knew the place; he knew the routine. And there’d be a couple of drinks afterwards. He opened the door into Paddy Lennon’s office.

The old man was sitting at his desk, a green shade over his eyes, totting up figures. The room was tiny, lined with ledgers and files, the desk piled with skewered bills and receipts. Paddy raised his eyes and pushed up the shade.

‘You’re late.’

‘Why the fuck’s everyone always telling me I’m late?’

‘Maybe it’s got something to do with the time.’

‘Is there a clock on this?’

Paddy Lennon simply smiled, but it was an odd sort of smile.

The steward put down his duffel bag and got out the Jacob’s tin.

The bar owner took it and put it in a drawer in the desk.

‘You should stay off the booze till a job’s done, Donal.’

‘I don’t take orders from you. I deliver and you collect. That’s it. I get my orders in Dublin. The job is done and that’s that. The way it always is.’

‘The way it always is,’ said Paddy, pulling down his eye shade.

As Donal Redmond walked back to the bar there were two men standing in his way. One of them was a uniformed NYPD officer. The other man wore a grey raincoat and still had his hat on. He was a policeman too, a detective. He didn’t need a uniform for the ship’s steward to know it.

‘Mr Redmond?’ It was the detective who spoke.

‘That’s right.’

‘I’d like a look at your passport and your papers.’

‘What for?’

‘Some sort of mix up, that’s all.’

‘What sort of mix up? I’m straight off my ship.’

The detective ought to have sounded apologetic; he didn’t.

‘We can give you a lift down to the precinct house. The sergeant just wants to look over the details. You can be on your way then. Will we go?’

There was something odd about the way they were looking at him. It wasn’t unpleasant. It wasn’t anything. But it was the same way Paddy Lennon had been looking at him in the back room. Donal Redmond knew he didn’t want to go with them. The detective opened his coat to pull out a packet of cigarettes. As he did Redmond saw the shoulder holster and the gun that sat in it. The detective didn’t take a cigarette from the packet. He was making a point. And the point was made.

As the three men left the bar, conversation among the customers resumed, as if they had never been there.

*

It was two days later that John Cavendish, sitting in the coffee bar across from the Irish Pavilion at the World’s Fair, reading The New York Times, saw an item at the bottom of page seven. A man’s body had been pulled out of the Hudson River. He had been identified from papers in his pocket as Donal Redmond, an Irishman who had only just arrived in New York; he had worked on the French Line boat, the Normandie, as a steward. It was believed that he had fallen into the Hudson from the ship, docked at Pier 17, when drunk.

It seemed that the captain’s source had dried up now anyway. There would be no more IRA ciphers. He had to hope that they had enough to find out what was going on, and he had to hope that Kate O’Donnell’s sister Niamh could give him what he needed most of all, the key to break the code, because no one was getting anywhere with deciphering the stuff in Dublin. He had hoped to get a bit more out of Donal Redmond though. He was disappointed; but probably not as disappointed as Donal had been himself.

3. Kilranelagh
West Wicklow

Garda Sergeant Stefan Gillespie was walking slowly down the stairs in the stone farmhouse below Kilranelagh. He was tired. The first ewes were lambing; he had been out in the haggard field behind the hay barn with his father till five in the morning, and now it was only eight. The smell of new life and morning frost was still in his nostrils; the clothes he’d lain down in were spattered with blood and urine, stiff with the grease from the ewes’ fleeces. Four twins, two singles, and only one born dead, strangled by its umbilical cord before he could get his hand in to turn it. There was a frail, dark triplet the ewe would have no milk for, to be reared for a time by the kitchen stove.

He had only been half asleep as the telephone started to ring. If his father was in bed and his mother was in the kitchen, it might ring till he answered it. It sat on a shelf by the front door, still looking very new, its black Bakelite shining; it had been there for almost a year now and it was polished more than it was used. It rang rarely enough that when it did Helena Gillespie would emerge from the kitchen and look at it for a few seconds, with an air of mild trepidation that she had not yet quite shaken off, before picking it up and speaking into it, slowly, carefully and loudly. She was coming out of the kitchen now, drying her hands on a tea towel. She smiled as Stefan arrived at the phone at the same time she did, and turned to go back to the breakfast she was cooking.

Tom Gillespie, Stefan’s nine-year-old son had got up from the breakfast table and was peering out. ‘Who is it, Oma?’ His grandmother shrugged. ‘It’ll be for your father. It always is.’ And it was. Superintendent Riordan was calling from the Garda barracks in Baltinglass.

‘You’re to go up to Dublin, Sergeant. They want you at headquarters as soon as you can get there. There’s no point coming in here. You’ll need to shift if you’re going to catch the train.’ Riordan was oddly formal. He would normally have called his station sergeant by his name, but since the message he had just received came from the Commissioner, this was a standing-up sort of phone call. There was also a hint of irritation in his voice; he didn’t like passing on a message from the Garda Commissioner to one of his officers when no one had had the courtesy to explain anything at all to him.

‘What’s all this about?’ asked Stefan.

‘If you don’t know, I’m sure I don’t.’

‘Well, I haven’t got the faintest idea, sir.’ Stefan smiled; he heard the irritation now; the ‘sir’ might help. He looked down at the clothes he was in. No one expected him in at the station today. ‘I’d better put a clean shirt on.’

‘The Commissioner wants you at eleven, so don’t piss about.’

The phone went down at the other end before Sergeant Gillespie could ask any more questions. Stefan walked into the kitchen, puzzled. Tom was eating his bacon and egg slowly, peering across the plate at the book he was reading, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Once he had grasped that the call was what most calls were at Kilranelagh, for his father, just another message, summons, query, instruction from the Garda station, he had lost interest. Helena was about to put another plate of bacon and egg on the table. Stefan reached out and picked up some bacon with his fingers and popped it in his mouth. That would have to do for breakfast.

Her lips tightened as she looked at his clothes.

‘Jesus, could you not have taken those off when you came in?’

He winked at Tom; Tom laughed.

‘Do you like making work for me, Stefan?’

‘You know I do, Ma!’

She turned back to the stove with a puff of irritation and a smile.

He leant across her and took another piece of bacon.

‘Have we got no plates now?’

‘Sorry, I haven’t got time.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’ve to be in Dublin. I’ll only just get the train.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. They want to see me at Garda HQ. They didn’t tell Gerry Riordan what it was about. I could see the expression on his face coming down the phone line at me!’ He laughed again, grabbing an apple from the bowl on the sideboard. He looked down at the lamb, sleeping in a cardboard box by the stove. ‘And don’t forget her, will you Tom?’

‘I won’t,’ his son nodded, still reading, not looking up.

He ran upstairs a lot faster than he’d come down. He wasn’t tired now. In a place where not much happened, anything happening was an event.

In the farmyard David Gillespie was driving a cow and a calf into the loose box next to the barn. Stefan took the bicycle that was leaning against the wall by the front door and cycled out round his father and the cow and calf; the cow stopped, bellowing darkly, and nudging her wobbling calf away.

‘I don’t know what time I’ll be back, Pa. I’ve to go to Dublin.’

His father nodded and tapped the cow’s backside.

‘Your Ma said.’

‘Ned Broy wants to see me. And pronto, apparently!’

‘What have you done?’ said David with a wry smile.

‘He’ll be worried about the sheep stealing again, I’d say, Pa.’ He rode out of the farmyard, down to the road.

His father watched him for a while, remembering the years that had passed since his son was last called to Garda Headquarters. At the end of all that Stefan had left his job as a detective in Dublin, and had come back to Baltinglass to work as a uniformed sergeant in the small West Wicklow town. It had been his own choice, driven as much as anything else by the responsibility he felt to his own son. Tom was only five then, living with his grandparents on the farm, seeing his father once a week, sometimes less. The four years that had passed since then had been happy ones for the most part, but in a family where emotions were sometimes as deeply hidden as they were deeply felt, David Gillespie knew that what his son gave to that happiness came at a price.

It wasn’t a price Stefan begrudged, but it was still a price. His life had been on hold. There were things that weren’t easy; there were corners where the comfortable contentment the Garda sergeant showed his Wicklow neighbours was less than comfortable. He lived in a place he loved, with the people he loved. It was what he had felt he had to do; it was not all he was.

For Stefan’s mother it was simple enough; all that was missing was a woman, not to take the place of her son’s now six-years-dead wife, Maeve, but to fill the empty places.

David Gillespie knew it went further than that. A long time ago he had put his own life on hold, for very different reasons, and he had come back to the farm above Baltinglass to give himself the space to breathe. He had breathed the air that came down from the mountains very deeply, and like his son he loved it, but it was a narrower life than he had wanted, with all its gifts. David had found a way to calm what was restless and dissatisfied in himself; perhaps he had nowhere else to go. But he recognised the same restlessness in his son; he recognised that it went deeper too.

He looked round the farmyard for a moment, then up at the hills that surrounded it, Keadeen, Kilranelagh, Baltinglass Hill. It was a great deal, but it would not be enough, not the way it had been for him, even if Stefan had persuaded himself it could be. David Gillespie shrugged, and turned back to the suspicious cow and her calf, driving them into the loose box.

Inevitably some of the same thoughts came into Stefan’s head as he cycled through Baltinglass’s Main Street and along Mill Street to the station, but it was easier to think about the present than the past. As he sat on the train following the River Slaney north towards Naas and Dublin, he looked out of the window and thought how little what he’d been doing in recent weeks could interest the brass in the Phoenix Park. He smiled. Sheep stealing really was about as serious as it got.

There was the new Dance Hall Act, of course, which required all dances to be licensed in light of the moral dangers the Church felt were inherent in dancing. A spate of unpopular raids was taking Stefan into the courthouse in Baltinglass on a weekly basis now. Yesterday he’d been giving evidence against the Secretary of the Dunlavin Bicycling Association and the Rathvilly Association Football Club. Admittedly the Dance Hall Act was causing considerable anger among the unmarried guards in Baltinglass who, when they weren’t raiding the dances, were dancing at them.

Then there was the pen of in-lamb ewes he was pursuing, that had disappeared from Paddy Kelly’s farm on Spynans Hill in February. Christy Hannity had bought them from Paddy at a farm sale and swore blind the old man had put them back on to the mountain while he was in the pub. It wasn’t the first time Paddy Kelly had played this trick and got away with it. All he had to say now was that mountain sheep had their own ways and Christy was too drunk to remember what he’d done with them.

And there were two days wasted on James MacDonald who had assaulted the Water Bailiff, Cathal Patterson, after refusing to give up a salmon found in his possession by the Slaney. He claimed the salmon was a trout, which he had since eaten. As for the Water Bailiff’s nose, didn’t he break it himself, tripping over a dead cat as he was walking out of Sheridan’s Bar?

It was hard to push the past out of the way altogether as Stefan walked from Kingsbridge Station through the Phoenix Park to the long, low stone building that was part eighteenth-century army barracks and part Irish country house. Nothing very much had happened in the last four years; most of what had, had happened to his son. He had no problem with that; it was why he had left CID, why he had left Dublin, why he went home. But the thought of how easily and how completely he had left behind the job he had always wanted, since the day he joined the Gardaí, had never struck him as starkly before as it did in the few moments he spent waiting outside Ned Broy’s office.

It hadn’t only been about Tom of course. He had also left because it suited everybody, the Garda Commissioner included. He had been involved in investigating two murders that in the end nobody wanted investigated too publicly. There had been justice of a kind, finally, but it had been a rough justice that the Irish state didn’t want to know about.

For a time it had been easiest for Detective Sergeant Gillespie to become plain Sergeant Gillespie in a country police station. No one had really meant him to stay there so long. He hadn’t intended that himself. It just happened, because that was what was best for Tom. Now, as Stefan sat in Ned Broy’s office again, he could feel an awkwardness in the Garda Commissioner. Sergeant Gillespie’s submerging in a backwater had not been what he had intended either.

Whatever was urgent, the Commissioner’s opening words weren’t.

‘So, how’s West Wicklow?’

‘Quiet enough, sir.’

‘You’re keeping Gerry Riordan in check, I hope.’

‘Well, mostly he does what he’s told.’

The Commissioner smiled. There was a moment’s silence.

‘You’ve been there a long time.’

‘Four years doesn’t seem so long. Time goes fast enough.’

‘Bollocks, you’re not old enough to say that yet.’

Stefan laughed. They were only words, but the Commissioner was looking at him quizzically now, remembering what had happened before.

‘Your father’s well? And your lad?’

The Commissioner had a good memory at least.

‘We’re all grand.’

‘And you’re happy down the country?’

‘Happy enough, sir.’ Stefan was aware that the polite remarks, whatever was about to follow, meant nothing to Broy, but it was the first time anyone had asked him such a direct question about his job, and by extension his life. The answer he gave was the answer any Irishman would give to such a question; an answer that could mean anything from despair to exultation, and everything in between. He was aware that he was avoiding a direct answer, not for the Garda Commissioner’s sake, but for his own.

‘A woman is missing.’

Broy suddenly stood up and moved slowly towards the window that looked out on to the Phoenix Park. The trees were still bare. Spring wasn’t far away now, but it still felt like winter.

‘There is every reason to believe she’s dead, and that she was killed.’ He turned back from the window. ‘The fact that she’s missing is the only thing that’s been in the newspapers so far. We can keep it like that for a little longer. And it’s helpful that we do, for various reasons. She is a Mrs Leticia Harris, with a house in Herbert Place.’

‘I think I did read something about it, sir.’

‘The evidence from the house, along with Mrs Harris’s car,’ continued the Commissioner, ‘indicates that she was the object of a very brutal attack in her home. Her car, however, was found in the grounds of a house close to Shankill, by the sea in Corbawn Lane. It’s clear she had been in the car, or her body had. At the moment we believe she was killed at the house in Herbert Place, or at least that she was dead by the time she reached Corbawn Lane, where the body was probably taken from the car and thrown into the sea. What the tides have done with her is anybody’s guess at this point.’

It was odd, but Stefan could feel his heart racing slightly. It was an unfamiliar feeling. It was excitement. It was four years since he had worked as a detective, but the instincts that had made him good at his job were still there. He felt as if a light had just been switched on inside his head.

‘Mrs Harris has a son. Owen. He’s twenty-one years old. I don’t think we know enough about him to understand what kind of man he is, but we know his relationship with his mother was very difficult, in all sorts of ways. Some of those ways had to do with money. Mrs Harris has lived apart from her husband for a considerable time, over ten years in fact. He’s a doctor, of some note, with a practice in Pembroke Road. From what Doctor Harris has told detectives, I think you’d describe the relationship between mother and son as highly strung, which is a polite way of saying they were a bloody peculiar pair. Superintendent Gregory at Dublin Castle is in charge, but it’s a big operation, involving detectives from several stations, as well as Special Branch. The short version is that we believe Owen Harris murdered his mother and dumped her in the sea.’

‘And where is he now?’ asked Stefan. The Commissioner’s tone of voice told him that wherever he was he certainly wasn’t in Garda custody.

‘New York.’

‘That was quick work.’

‘He left from Cobh two days after his mother disappeared.’

‘So is he in custody? In New York?’

‘No, but we know where he is.’

The Commissioner sat back down again, his lips pursed. It was more to do with irritation than anything else. Stefan could already sense this case was about more than a suspected murderer. Broy opened a file on his desk.

‘Mr Harris is at the Markwell Hotel, which is somewhere near Times Square – 220 West 49th Street to be exact. It’s felt there’s no need for his arrest or extradition.’

Stefan was aware this was a slightly odd way of putting it, as if it wasn’t entirely the Commissioner’s decision.

‘He’s agreed to come back to Ireland voluntarily to be interviewed, as soon as possible, as soon as practical. That’s why you’re here, Sergeant.’

This may have been the most interesting conversation Stefan Gillespie had had in a police station since he went to Baltinglass as station sergeant, but so far its purpose was as clear as mud. He looked at Broy blankly.

‘The business of bringing this man Harris back from New York is a delicate one. It’s all going to cause a stir when it comes out here, and the powers that be would rather it didn’t do the same thing in New York. Since he’s agreed to return, as I say, simply so that we can talk to him, the decision has been made not to involve the police in New York. Mr McCauley, the consul, has seen him, and there is a feeling that his mental state is – well, I think unpredictable is the word he used.’

Stefan nodded, as if this clarified things.

‘Mr Harris is in New York with the Gate Theatre. He’s some sort of stage manager. They’re on a tour and they’re about to open on Broadway.’

The expression on Broy’s face indicated that this explained something else; it didn’t but the presence of the past, and of conversations in the Commissioner’s office four years ago, was closer.

‘This Gate tour coincides with the opening of the World’s Fair in New York. You’ll have read about that, I’d say, and the Irish Pavilion? It’s de Valera’s pride and joy.’

‘A bit,’ replied Stefan.

‘You won’t have read how much the fecking pavilion’s costing.’ Broy gave a wry smile. ‘There aren’t many state secrets more secret than that one.’

‘I see,’ said Stefan, though he still didn’t.

‘It’s all about punching above our weight, that’s the thing. That’s how our leader sees it anyway. There’s a pavilion from almost every country on the face of the earth, but we’re not there to show what great fellers we are on our Emerald Isle. We’re there to show the way, to the small countries of the world. Dev wouldn’t want you to think we’re spending all that money we don’t have just to boost the holiday trade. It’s a grander scheme altogether. Aren’t we God’s living proof that the great empires are dead and it’s the independent nations that will inherit the earth?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t put too much money on it at the moment,’ said Stefan. ‘What do they think about that in what’s left of Czechoslovakia?’ The presence of what the newspapers had been full of for weeks, Germany’s dismemberment of at least one of those small nations, was hard to ignore.

‘Well, they might not have got a country, but I think they’ve got a pavilion at the World’s Fair,’ shrugged the Commissioner. ‘The future may be a long way off so. But I’m telling you why what happens in New York is important, to Dev anyway. And while we show the world what we’ve done since we kicked out the British Empire, a bit of theatre on Broadway will add to the kudos. The Gate tour is all part of it, but the whole thing’s a performance. Nobody wants headlines about an Irish actor who stopped to murder his mother before he set off for New York. We need your man Harris out of America and back here as fast as we can manage it, before he turns into the spectre at the feast. You’re going to New York to fetch him.’

It was an unexpected proposition.

‘I assume there’s a reason it’s me, sir.’ Stefan couldn’t think of one.

‘Mr Harris is in a hotel room. The consulate’s keeping an eye on him, but the people looking after him are his friends, other actors. No police, no heavy hands. I think it’s all a lot riskier than the politicians do, but that’s the decision. Mr Mac Liammóir is the one who has persuaded Harris to come back. It’s his company after all. I don’t imagine he’d be any more enthusiastic about the wrong sort of headlines than anyone here. Everyone wants the man out of there quietly. And in Mr Mac Liammóir’s words he doesn’t want some bollocks of a Dublin detective putting the shite up him. In a police force staffed mostly by bollockses – you were the least like a bollocks he could think of.’

Sergeant Gillespie smiled. It was four years since he’d last spoken to Mac Liammóir, the actor and director who was the Gate Theatre’s founder, but he didn’t need to be told those were his words.

Four years ago the body of a young man had been found buried in the Dublin Mountains, close to the body of a woman who had recently disappeared. It had been a Gate theatre ticket that had helped identify the man, but the investigation had taken Stefan Gillespie a long way from Dublin, to Danzig and the heart of the European crisis that was now threatening to spill into war. It had brought him face to face with what mattered most in his life. It had led him to the only woman he had come close to loving since the death of his wife, Maeve, six years ago. When it finished the thread of passion that had held Stefan Gillespie and Hannah Rosen briefly together had broken. It had been inevitable.

The investigation itself had concluded in the dark corridors where unwanted investigations were given an indecent burial. Micheál Mac Liammóir was a memory from that time, but Stefan remembered him as a man who had looked for discretion and trust from him, and had found it. Clearly those same qualities still mattered.

‘So everyone’s pretending he’s not a murder suspect, sir?’

‘We’re dealing with this at a distance.’ The Commissioner ignored the question. ‘The conversations are in telegrams and even they’re at second or third hand. The decision not to involve the New York police is a political one. Extradition could drag on for months if Harris digs his heels in. We’d a feller embezzled six hundred pounds as a tax collector in Kerry. It took nearly a year to get him extradited from Boston. Even that made The New York Times. If your man takes it into his head not to cooperate and we have to drag him through the courts, well, axe-murderers make great headlines. Not the ones Dev wants. Mac Liammóir thinks Harris is harmless if he’s handled the right way. His mother might have had a few things to say about that, but at the end of it all, a policeman who’s not too much like a policeman is what we want.’

‘Should I take that as a compliment, sir?’ said Stefan, smiling.

‘Mr Mac Liammóir obviously thinks it is. I’m going along with this because we are relying on the Gate. I don’t need to tell you it isn’t going down well everywhere. Superintendent Gregory is in charge of the investigation. You know him?’

Stefan knew who Gregory was. ‘I’ve probably met him. I think he was at the Castle, in Special Branch, when I was a detective at Pearse Street.’

‘Special Branch is running it. There’s no reason to think it involves anyone other than the mother or the son, except that it’s already dragging in the government, the Department of External Affairs and my fucking Uncle Tom Cobley. And while I wouldn’t say Dev’s a friend of the family, he’d know the father. Doctor Harris carries some weight. So there’s that too. Put it all together and you see why kid gloves are the order of the day, Sergeant.’

Though Stefan nodded, he wasn’t sure that handing the thing over to Special Branch was the answer to that; kid gloves weren’t their speciality.

‘You fly to New York the day after tomorrow.’

Stefan was surprised; he had assumed he would be going by boat.

‘You’ll know the flying boat service has just started operating from Foynes. I won’t tell you what it’ll cost, but somebody seems to think the wrong headlines will cost more. It will get you to New York in less than twenty-four hours. You’ll be there two days and then straight back. A boat’s going to take more than a fortnight. Right now the kid gloves are yours, Stefan. I don’t need to tell you Terry Gregory thinks this is shite. He may be right, but I’m doing it the way I’ve been asked, softly-softly. My office will make all the arrangements. There’s a detective here to fill you in. He’ll take you to see the superintendent.’ Ned Broy laughed. ‘Don’t expect much of a reception.’

As he left the Garda Commissioner’s office Stefan was surprised to see that the detective waiting for him was not the surly, jumped-up bollocks from Special Branch he was expecting, but the large and familiar figure of Dessie MacMahon, once his partner in the detectives’ office at Pearse Street Garda station. Dessie and Stefan had kept in touch over the years, but it was still a while since the two men had seen each other.

‘How’s it going, Sarge?’ grinned Dessie.

‘You tell me, Sergeant,’ Stefan answered. ‘It is sergeant now?’

‘Well, if you sit on your arse long enough –’

‘So what’s this got to do with you?’

‘They’re stuck with me. I was the first detective into Herbert Place. The maid called Pearse Street when she went into the house and saw the state of Mrs Harris’s bedroom, the blood that is. So I’m working out of Dublin Castle for the time being. But everybody’s getting a look in on this one, I tell you. I don’t know why. Superintendent Gregory decided the son killed the old lady the day they found her car at Shankill. But you still can’t move for inspectors and superintendents and chief superintendents. We’ve got Inspector O’Sullivan and Superintendent Dunlevy from Dún Laoghaire, Chief Superintendent Reynolds from Headquarters, Superintendent Clarke from Bray, not to mention Special Branch calling the shots at the Castle.’

‘You know I’ve got to bring Harris back from New York?’

‘I’ve to take you to see Superintendent Gregory,’ nodded Dessie. ‘You know you’ll be getting more of a bollocking than a briefing from him?’

Stefan smiled. ‘Let’s get on with it so.’

‘He’s busy at the moment. He’ll be out at Corbawn Lane later.’

‘Corbawn Lane where –’

‘Where Mrs Harris’s car was. It’s where he dumped her in the sea.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘The only instructions I’ve got are that you’re a fucking messenger boy and that’s how you’re to be treated. You’re not a fucking detective. You’re not part of the fucking investigation. Nobody’s to tell you anything about anything, or give you even a sniff of the job. You’ll be bollocked when the super’s got the time. Apart from that, Mr Gregory didn’t tell me to welcome you aboard, but I’m sure if he wasn’t so busy he would have.’

They walked out of Garda Headquarters.

‘I tell you what I’d like to do?’ Stefan gave Dessie a wry smile. It was a long time since he’d been this close to a murder. ‘Have a look at Herbert Place. That’s where she was killed? So if you were the first one in there –’

‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’

‘Yes, so it’ll be more than your job’s worth. Is that right?’

Detective Sergeant MacMahon grinned.

‘With a bit of luck.’

*

‘Blood.’

As Detective Sergeant Dessie MacMahon started to climb the stairs of the big Georgian terrace in Herbert Place he pointed at the fifth tread, without stopping. Sergeant Stefan Gillespie did stop, bending to look down at the dark, densely patterned stair carpet; red, black, yellow, thistle-like flowers endlessly repeated. Only the chalk marks showed him where to look; a small brown stain stood out against yellow and red.

‘Blood.’

Dessie pointed at two of the uprights on the grey-painted banister. It was a long time since they had been painted. Again only traces of chalk made the smears of brown that could have been almost anything, or even nothing at all, immediately visible.

‘Blood.’

As he carried on Dessie’s left hand gestured at a chalk circle beside two crooked picture frames. They had been recently knocked askew; an oval, ebonised frame enclosing a sepia photograph of a heavily bearded man in a frock coat; a chipped, gilt square of plasterwork surrounding a sampler that was a map of Ireland with the counties outlined in green thread. Between them another streak of something brown marked the muddy swirls of the embossed wallpaper. Where the frames had moved they revealed that once the indeterminate colour of the wallpaper had been a startling emerald green. There was little wallpaper to be seen however.

The staircase wall, like the walls of the hall and the landing above it, was lined with pictures, maps, photographs; paintings of dogs and horses; faded prints of flowers; maps of Ireland, Britain, India, the Mediterranean. The mostly Victorian men and women who gazed out of the heaviest frames, with a mixture of confidence and disapproval, looked old whatever age they were. It was all heavy, dark, as if the images and colours lining the walls had faded into a uniform smog.

Dessie stopped as the staircase turned to the right, on to the landing, where the repeated pattern of the carpet stretched left and right along the corridor, between the gloomy, embossed walls and the grey-painted doors. It was lighter here though. A window gave on to Herbert Place below. Dessie was slightly breathless. A larger, elliptical chalk circle spread out on to the landing from the top stair; the bloodstains were clearer here.

‘She must have been carried out the bedroom. But the body was put down here a moment. There’s more blood on the walls up there, and on the pictures.’ Dessie gestured to the left, along the corridor, where several more prints and photographs hung at odd angles. ‘Either he put her down or he dropped her.’

Stefan looked. Dessie walked on past two closed doors.

The third door was open. Through it was a big bedroom as cluttered and claustrophobic as the hall and the landing. There were clear signs of a struggle: smashed ornaments, pictures knocked off the walls, a broken chair, a table on its side, sheets and blankets pulled across the big bed on to the floor. But where the smell in the hallway and on the landing was of polish and dust and years of airlessness, the smell here was of smoke and burnt wood; not strong but acrid and sharp.

Dessie took out a packet of Sweet Afton and lit a cigarette. Stefan walked into the centre of the room. There were two small rugs, though it was clear the rest of the floor had been covered until recently too. The floorboards were grimy with age but they had only been varnished at the edges of the room. A carpet must have covered the area in front of the bed, though it wasn’t there now. Close to the bottom of the bed the floorboards were blacker than elsewhere, charred. Stefan looked at the black patch and bent down. He rubbed something that was like charcoal on to his fingers.

‘Just in time, I’d say.’

Dessie nodded. ‘When the maid came in there was an electric fire on. It must have been going full pelt for a couple of days. The boards were starting to burn underneath. If she hadn’t come back when she did the place would have gone up so. She threw a bucket of water over it.’ He laughed and drew in some more smoke. ‘She fused the whole house, but it did the trick.’

‘So do you think it was deliberate? Starting a fire?’

‘I’d say not,’ replied Dessie. ‘There’d have to be better ways to do that. No, this was where she was killed and there was a lot of blood. Someone tried to clean it up. There’s soap mixed with the blood. The story is he put the fire on to dry the floor, then left. But as he never came back –’

Stefan was still looking down at the floor.

‘What happened to the carpet?’

‘The State Pathologist took some of the rugs and the bedclothes, but the carpet had gone already. Your man must have had it. It would have been soaked looking at what’s round the room. Maybe he brought it with him. Maybe he wrapped the body in it. There’s not a lot of blood in the car. She was on the back seat, so she must have been covered in something anyway.’

‘So with all this blood – she was stabbed? Is there a weapon?’

‘I’ll show you where the axe was. We’ll go out the back way.’

The garden that led down to the mews at the back of the house in Herbert Place was neatly kept, but it was bare and grey. Squares of grass and small, dark rhododendrons; tightly clipped bushes took up the flower beds. When the spring came there would be few enough flowers to give colour. Dessie pointed out several chalk-marked stains on the stone paved path that led to the two-storey mews; a little more blood to mark where the body had been half-dragged and half-carried from the house.

They walked through a door into the gutted stables that had once housed the family’s horses, and now smelt of the leaked engine oil that stained the stone floor. There were a couple of bicycles, some garden tools, a workbench full of spanners and wrenches, rusty and cobwebbed. Against one wall was a pile of cut turf, with sticks for the fires stacked beside it. Dessie stood by the turf and kicked at it.

‘There was a small hatchet here, under a pile of turf. There’s a gardener comes in now and again. He uses it for splitting wood for a bit of kindling. So it was kept in the garage. It had a good wash but there was still blood on it. They think it was maybe hot water, so instead of the blood running away it coagulated. They reckon it must be what killed her though.’

He walked across the empty garage to the double doors.

‘Mrs Harris’s car was kept in here. So he must have brought the body in, then shoved her on to the back seat. Bit tight in a Baby Austin. Timings aren’t very clear. Only one sighting of the car. It was probably dark when he left.’

Detective Sergeant MacMahon opened one of the doors.

‘Evening, night?’ asked Stefan as they walked out into the lane that ran behind Herbert Place. It was almost empty, as it must have been then.

‘Not late. Seven, maybe eight o’clock.’

Two boys were walking slowly along the lane towards Mount Street. Stefan Gillespie watched them for a moment as Dessie lit another cigarette. They were ten or eleven, one of them dragging a cart behind him, the base of an old pram, stacked with broken boxes and cardboard.

He recognised the boys’ slow, patient walk from the years he had spent tramping the streets of Dublin as a guard. There were thousands of children just like them. He recognised the odd combination of resignation and anticipation in the way they moved, their eyes alert for any piece of wood, anything that would burn, anything that would keep a fire going in the tenement where there was never any money for coal or turf, or anything else. He recognised the grey clothes drained of any colour they might once have had, too big on one boy, too small on the other, that had been handed down more times than anyone could remember. He knew the damp, dark, rotten, infested houses that Éamon de Valera’s new Ireland had still not touched, and he knew the cold, crowded room in one of those houses that the boys would live in.

Suddenly one of them darted across the lane with a shout to grab the prize of half of an orange box. They were laughing. And after the blood and the well-heeled claustrophobia of the house where Leticia Harris had been hacked to death, their laughter was a reassuring sound. Stefan smiled, turning back to Dessie.

‘So where is she?’

Sergeant MacMahon shrugged, drawing on his Sweet Afton.

‘We’ve got a sweepstake going at the Castle. They reckon it was high tide when the old lady was thrown in the sea. My money’s on Scotland.’

4. Corbawn Lane

Corbawn Lane was a long, straight road that led from the village of Shankill to the sea. There were dark hedges and closely planted trees on both sides of the lane; the trees reached up and arched across the road almost the whole length, sometimes meeting in the middle. Even with the trees not yet in leaf, the straight line of the lane created the effect of a tunnel out of the skeleton branches.

Eight miles south of Dublin, Shankill was a place of small farms and country houses, just beyond the reach of the city’s slowly spreading suburbia. Around the village clusters of new bungalows payed homage to a still very English idea of what it was to live near the sea, but they were also a statement that the city had its eye on Shankill’s fields and estates. Yet Corbawn Lane was still a long way from Dublin. Every so often a break in one of the long hedges announced that somewhere among the trees there was a big house: Dorney Court, Lisnalurg, Clarebeg, then across the bridge over the railway, Llanmawr, Eaton Brae, and then, where the lane finally ended, hard against the sea and the small cliff beyond, the turning to the right, past the last lodge, into the last house called Clifton.

Several cars were parked in front of the house, among them the Austin that Dessie MacMahon had driven down from Herbert Place.

It was a grey house; the grey stucco beneath the grey-black roof was grubbily spotted with algae and lichen in various shades of grey, and at the corners of the house it was starting to crumble away. The house itself was empty; it had been empty for a long time. The big downstairs windows that looked out over the garden to the sea were covered by boards that had themselves become grey and stained over the years; upstairs the curtains were closed.

The gardens that led across the lawn to a row of trees and the sea were controlled rather than cared for; someone came to cut the grass and stop the borders going wild but that was all.

Stefan Gillespie and Dessie MacMahon stood at the far side of the garden where a thick hedge separated it from the low cliffs and the sea beyond. The hedge was smashed and broken; the grass around it was muddy and churned; there were the deep ruts of car tyres that had been spinning and spinning aimlessly there.

‘I told you about the Baby Austin Mrs Harris drove. She’d only had it three months. It was her pride and joy apparently. She seems to have spent most of those three months driving it around Dublin. And this is where they found it, jammed into the hedge right here. The night she disappeared a friend of hers saw the car coming out of Herbert Place and turning on to Baggot Street. The woman thinks it was Owen Harris who was driving it.’

‘So he brought it here? With the body in the back?’ said Stefan.

‘It’s hard to see it any other way. He had to get rid of it. He must have decided the sea was his best bet. It wasn’t such a daft idea either. She hasn’t been found. Whether he was trying to get the car into the sea as well –’

They both looked up for a moment. There was the drone of an aircraft overhead. A small plane was following the coast, northwards towards Dublin. Across the garden hedge where the cliff dropped down to the beach below, uniformed guards were walking along at the water’s edge, their eyes fixed on the sand and rock; offshore there were two small boats. The beach had been searched and re-searched, but every day it was searched again with the tides in case the sea gave anything up.

‘We’re up and down the whole east coast,’ said Dessie, ‘from Wexford right up to the North. They’re looking in Wales, Scotland, the Lancashire coast. Not a sign of her.’

‘It’s going to be hard work keeping all that quiet, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a missing woman, that’s all anybody’s saying.’

‘So why here?’ asked Stefan.

‘It was the family house. Where Harris lived when he was a lad, before the old man and the old lady went their ways. They’d been living apart for years. The father still owns it. So the assumption is Owen Harris knew it, that’s the long and the short of it. And he knew it was empty.’

‘And he tried to drive straight through the hedge?’

‘That wasn’t such a good idea. It’s some hedge. And he got it stuck. It went through so far, but it couldn’t get any further. Then the wheels started to spin and it wouldn’t move at all. He couldn’t go forward and he couldn’t back out. So the story is he got her out of the car and dragged her through the hedge. He pulled her, carried her, whatever he did, and he got her down on to the rocks. Then he shoved her off. It was high tide. Whether that was luck or he knew – I guess he’ll tell us that himself, eventually. It did the job. The problem was the car. Nothing was going to move it. Or get the blood off the back seat. He had no choice. He just left it here and he went home …’

‘Where’s the car now?’

‘It’s in the garage at Dublin Castle. They’ve had a good go at it, the State Pathologist and the rest. It’s given us more blood and it makes it hard to argue Owen Harris wasn’t here. Not that he seems to have gone to great lengths to hide that. He stopped a car at the top of Corbawn Lane by the AA box and asked the feller for a ride into town. He got dropped in Ballsbridge.’

‘Jesus, what the hell did he look like by then?’ Stefan shook his head.

‘Let’s say he made an impression. It was a couple, a man and a woman. I think when he walked out in front of the car they were too scared not to give him a lift. He told them he was an Englishman from Tunbridge Wells, on holiday. They had no idea what he’d done of course, but I think they were relieved to reach Ballsbridge in one piece. The conversation was a bit one-sided, but they said he apologised for the Norman invasion, the Famine, the Act of Union, the Black and Tans, and the Economic War, and said he hoped political developments would bring a new dawn in Anglo-Irish relations.’ Dessie laughed. ‘For some reason “new dawn” did stick.’

Stefan was laughing too.

Sergeant MacMahon took out a cigarette, cupping his hands to light it.

‘So does anyone know what it was all about?’

‘Apart from the fact that the mother and son were both barking?’

‘And were they?’ asked Stefan.

‘They were always fighting the peace out, according to the maid anyway. Mrs Harris was a great one for throwing the delft across the room.’

‘Just an ordinary Irish family then.’

‘Well, there was definitely something wrong upstairs,’ said Dessie. ‘She’d come out of a convalescent home six weeks ago. She’d been in there a month. For the rest, according to Doctor Harris. Superintendent Gregory likes to refer to him as the “estranged” husband. They were all a bit strange if you ask me. Anyway, the doctor says she was very highly strung. Fragile nerves. She needed rests like that quite a lot. This time it was after she’d broken into the old fella’s house and stolen a canteen of cutlery. She locked herself in her bedroom with it for three days.’

‘When did the marriage break up?’

‘They hadn’t lived together since Owen Harris was seven. That’s when they were all here. The old man’s in Pembroke Road now. He owns the house in Herbert Place too. She didn’t have any money. He kept the both of them.’

‘So Owen Harris had a row with his mammy and killed her?’ Stefan frowned. ‘And that’s it. What did she do, throw one plate too many at him?’

‘Maybe we’ll find out when we get him back,’ replied Sergeant MacMahon. ‘The maid says they were rowing about money. He wanted some and she wouldn’t give it to him. It was to do with this theatre tour in America, the Gate. The actors had to stump up their own fares. So that’s what he needed it for.’

‘And she wasn’t having it?’

‘There wasn’t a lot of spare money about. She lived on what her husband gave her. He wouldn’t be a man to throw it about, so they say.’

‘But there was money, wasn’t there?’ continued Stefan.

‘There was a bit Mrs Harris had from working for the Hospitals’ Sweepstake. She did a lot of that, but they only paid her expenses. It’s meant to be charity. She had an office in a room at the back of the house, and a secretary came in sometimes to do a bit of typing. That’s it. There wouldn’t have been any sort of living in it at all. Money was the main topic of conversation at Herbert Place, well, how Mrs Harris never had any was.’

‘She had a brand new car!’

‘She did so,’ said Dessie, ‘and in a shoebox on top of the wardrobe in her bedroom, she had a box with six hundred and seventeen pounds in it.’

‘That doesn’t make much sense.’

Dessie shrugged; it didn’t.

‘So where did that come from?’

‘Same place as the car.’

‘Doctor Harris didn’t buy her that then?’

‘No. She bought it herself.’

‘And –’

‘And what? Nobody seems bothered about it at the Castle.’

Stefan was surprised. He would have wanted to know.

‘So Harris killed his mother because she wouldn’t give him the money he wanted, and then left six hundred pounds sitting on top of the wardrobe?’

‘The assumption is he didn’t know it was there.’

‘But he did get the money to pay for the boat to New York?’

Sergeant MacMahon shrugged again. Although he had offered no opinions, Stefan knew that he didn’t think much of the investigation.

‘Couldn’t he have got that from the father?’

‘No. The old man thinks he’s a waster. As for the acting, it’s a joke as far as he’s concerned. I’ve only seen the old feller once. Superintendent Gregory brought him to Herbert Place. I wouldn’t say he had much to do with them any more, the lad or his mother. He gave them both an allowance of some sort, as little as he could get away with, that’s the word.’

Stefan Gillespie was looking down at the hedge and the tyre tracks.

‘Did anyone know she had money?’

‘She was always short. Bills were never paid. But she had cash when she wanted it. No one else is very interested in what the maid had to say, but Mrs Harris bought clothes she never wore and paid a lot for them. She was fond of fur as well. And when she bought the Austin Seven she paid cash. When she went out to a restaurant with her friends she didn’t just go anywhere. And she always paid her share too.’

‘You got on well with the maid, did you?’ smiled Stefan.

‘They had her sitting around at Dublin Castle long enough.’

‘So where does she think the money came from?’

‘I wasn’t in on any of the interviews.’

‘But you asked her, Dessie, come on!’

‘She doesn’t have much doubt about it. The old lady was fiddling the Sweepstake. She collected up the money that came in from abroad. It went to a post office box, but the post office delivered it to Herbert Place. Some days there’d be sackfuls, from all over, England, America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, cheques, postal orders, and cash. Hundreds of pounds. She took the cheques into a bank in Baggot Street, cashed the postal orders, and then delivered it all to the Sweepstake office. She kept accounts, but I don’t know how they were checked. It wouldn’t have been hard to skim a bit off.’

‘And Superintendent Gregory isn’t looking at that?’ asked Stefan.

‘They’ve decided they know what happened. The eejit son killed her and chucked her in the sea. It’s as far as anyone needs to look. Or wants to.’

Stefan was puzzled, even after everything Dessie had said.

‘And how many detectives are there on this?’

‘They’re looking for the body, Sarge.’ Dessie laughed again. He was still calling Stefan ‘Sarge’, though he was now a sergeant himself; old habits. He was enjoying this conversation; old habits, old times. ‘Nobody’s got any doubt about what happened. I don’t know whether Owen Harris really thinks he’s coming home for a chat, but I’d say he could be coming back for the long drop. As for the Sweepstake business, it’s nothing to do with anything, I’ve been told. I’m not saying they’ve got it wrong, but no one wants to know any more. If he was here he must have been here with the body.’

Stefan nodded. Maybe there were other things to find out. Maybe for some reason there were things to find out that nobody really wanted to look into. But there were enough facts to make it hard to see beyond Owen Harris killing his mother and dumping her body out here.

He looked at the sea for a moment. He knew the smell of all this now. There were people who mattered in it. There were lids to be kept on things. There was a show to put on at New York’s World’s Fair that was far more important than a squalid and brutal murder in Ireland. There were reputations riding on it. There were newspaper headlines that Ireland’s hard-earned money had bought. Now there was the country’s Hospitals’ Sweepstake too; it brought in money the country didn’t have, to pay for hospitals it desperately needed, money from all over the world; it was money that would dry up in the face of newspaper headlines about laziness, incompetence, fraud. Stefan could see now why the investigation was in the hands of the Special Branch.

There was a crime to solve that seemed to have an easy, ready solution. But it had to be solved in a way that meant it was contained and controlled. Special Branch was there to make sure there was no spillage. He was a part of the politics now.

The Garda Commissioner was sending him to New York because he could bring Harris back to Ireland with the lid firmly on; without giving him the slightest idea he might be coming home to hang.

‘Enjoying yourself, Sergeant Gillespie?’

Stefan turned at the sound of a voice behind him. Introductions were unnecessary. Superintendent Gregory knew who he was, that was clear.

‘It’ll be a treat for you, coming all the way to Dublin on the train.’

Terry Gregory was in his mid-fifties, his face round and red in the way that marked out detectives who spent more time in the pub than the office. He wore a black overcoat that was too small for him, a brown trilby that was too big. The smile on his face was temporary; it would change to a sneer shortly. But the smile, like the imminent sneer, advertised displeasure.

Behind him stood two detectives in belted raincoats and hats, like leftovers from an IRA demob sale. They were there because Special Branch superintendents never travelled alone. It would not be their job to speak.

‘So, you’ve been specially asked for by Mr Mac Liammóir?’

‘It seems that way, sir.’

‘Close to him are you?’

‘I’ve met him.’

‘You’d be well advised to guard your backs with this one, lads.’

The two detectives laughed; that was one of their jobs.

‘Still, you’re down in Wicklow with the mountainy men and the sheep shaggers, so maybe you’ll be just the man to take our Mr Harris in hand. So what’s it about, Sergeant Gillespie? That’s what I’d like to know. What are you doing here, and why the fuck is Ned Broy sending you to New York? You’re only a culchie station sergeant who couldn’t make it as a detective.’

‘I’m here because I’ve been told to be here, sir.’

‘And I’ve told Ned Broy what I think about it.’

‘He did say something about that.’

‘I see, you think you’re a clever fucker as well, do you?’

Stefan said nothing. Gregory turned to Dessie.

‘And what the hell are you doing?’

‘Nothing, sir,’ replied Detective Sergeant MacMahon.

‘No, nothing is what I told you to do, Dessie, but what you’ve been doing is taking our farmer’s boy on a scene-of-crime tour, as if he’s got something to do with this investigation.’

He swung round to Stefan again; any trace of a smile was gone now.

‘I don’t like people interfering with what I do. I don’t care if they come from Garda HQ or the Taoiseach’s office, it pisses me off. Now they’re coming from the poofs’ paradise at the fucking Gate Theatre. I’m stuck with you because Ned Broy hasn’t got the balls to tell the politicians where to put it. So this is what you do, Stevie boy. You get the plane, you look out the window with your eyes agog, and you go to New York. You get back on the plane with Harris and sit next to him until you get off at Foynes next week. I’ll be there, and when you’ve handed him over to me, you get the next train back to Baltinglass. In between you don’t ask him anything, you don’t talk about what happened, about Mrs Harris’s death, about how he killed her, what he did with the body, where he went, who he saw, who he spoke to. You do nothing that could fuck this up. You’re the courier and he’s the parcel. Is that clear enough?’

‘I’d say so. But what do I do about him talking to me?’

Superintendent Gregory had given Sergeant Gillespie his orders. He wasn’t asking to have a conversation about it. ‘You tell him to shut up too.’

‘What about the Gate?’ asked Stefan quietly but insistently.

‘Would you like me to write it down, Sergeant?’

‘He’s got friends there. He’s been with them since the day after the murder. He’s been shut in a hotel room with some of them since he agreed to come back to Ireland. Wouldn’t you want to know what he’s been saying?’

‘I’m sorry, Stevie, I didn’t realise Ned told you to take over.’

‘It’s a simple question, sir.’ Stefan allowed his irritation to show.

Terry Gregory walked forward until he was only inches from him. For the first time he spoke very quietly. The whiskey was strong on his breath.

‘You might not have much of a job down there, Sergeant, but if you screw this up, you’ll be sitting on an island off the Atlantic till the day you draw your pension. Nobody wants to know what you think. Now fuck off.’

He spun round and strode rapidly across the grass. The Special Branch detectives followed him. There was only the sound of the sea breaking slowly, rhythmically on the rocks below. Dessie MacMahon too started back towards the house.

Stefan was still for a moment. It was a peaceful place. The thought of what had happened barely a week ago seemed to collide in his mind with the image of a small boy playing in the garden, running down to the sea. He looked at the boarded-up French windows and remembered a photograph on the bloodstained wall at Herbert Place. He had barely noticed it, yet it had stayed in his head; a boy, freckled, in shorts and a white shirt and sandals, smiling by the same big windows, wide open then, pulling a wooden cart full of sand.

Stefan heard the buzz of the plane, searching for any signs of Leticia Harris’s body. He turned and walked on after Dessie.

*

It was just starting to get dark as Stefan Gillespie walked through the fields on the western side of the farm at Kilranelagh, across the Moat Field towards the woods that abruptly fell down the steep escarpment on the far side of the townland. The sheep were thick-coated and filthy with the winter’s rain; the grass was bare and poached, still waiting for the spring flush to show. He noted a ewe hobbling painfully, another down on her knees trying to find some grass worth eating. He had meant to help his father with the foot rot at the weekend; he wouldn’t be here.

He could hear the sound of children’s voices, and he altered his course down the slope towards the high mound that sat just beyond the corner of the field, a cluster of trees rising out of the woods, higher than everything else around it, looking down at the narrow gash of rock and earth and scrappy hazel woodland that was the steep-sided valley they called Moatamoy, after the mound itself.

It was no more than a smooth, round hillock, with a flat top full of twisted trees and brambles and ivy. Eight hundred years ago the top had been surrounded by a wooden palisade. A Norman village of grass-roofed, wattle-and-daub-and-stone houses had clustered at the corner of the field below it, indistinguishable from the grass-roofed, wattle-and-daub-and-stone houses of the Celts the palisaded motte was there to protect its inhabitants from. The Anglo-Normans who had lived here had sometimes fought the people around them, sometimes traded with them, sometimes killed them, sometimes married them, until eventually they had been absorbed into their surroundings so completely that they became, in the words that would always define them, níos Gaelaí ná na Gaeil iad féin, more Irish than the Irish.

Now the sheep grazed where the village had been, but the motte was still a castle, at least in the minds of the children who played there.

Stefan could pick out the voices as he climbed over the wire fence into the ditch that surrounded the motte. Tom’s first of all, shrill and enthusiastic and, it couldn’t be denied, with more than a hint of bossiness about it when the game was his game. He could hear the voices of the Lessingham children, Alexander who was seven, Jane who was ten, and the voice of the Lawlors’ son, Harry. Stefan started up the slope of the mound and found himself grabbed forcefully from behind; an arm was round his neck, holding him.

‘Surrender!’ The words hissed into his ear.

‘I surrender! Just don’t choke me!’

As the arm released him he turned, coughing and spluttering, to see a woman laughing at him.

‘Be quiet,’ she whispered, ‘and we’ll see if we can creep up on them.’

He nodded and smiled. He was used to it. For a moment the woman looked at him, and he looked at her. They were standing very close among the trees. He bent forward and kissed her lips. It was fond rather than passionate, but its familiarity told a deeper story.

At thirty-four Valerie Lessingham was a year older than Stefan. She lived with her children in the big house across the valley from the Kilranelagh farm. Her husband, Simon Lessingham, was an officer in the British Army, serving with his regiment in East Africa. He had been away for more than two years; absence had not made Valerie’s heart grow fonder. There had been cracks in their marriage for a long time; the fact that he was away so much was an excuse not to face them, as it was an excuse not to face other things. Like the cracks in the crumbling house they lived in, and the bigger cracks in the management of the estate that surrounded it, draining money out year after year and bringing nothing back. Lack of attention wasn’t a solution to those problems either.

Neither Valerie nor Stefan had looked for what had happened quite suddenly between them. They had come together for the simple reason that their children played together; their children were more the entire focus of their lives than they cared to admit. And so it happened.

Valerie walked up the slope ahead of him. She had a head of yellow hair to her shoulders. She was thin and tall, and strong enough to stand beside the men who worked on the estate and do the same job when she needed to. The clothes she was wearing, as they often were, had come out of the back of her husband’s wardrobe.

Stefan watched her, climbing gracefully and quietly up the slope. He was aware how much he liked her. She had the carelessness that somehow went with her class, even about their relationship, but she had a well of kindness that often didn’t. Whenever he thought about her, she was laughing. She laughed with everyone, but he sometimes felt that her laughter only really came from her heart with the children, and the children had come to include Tom Gillespie, more often than not.

The track across the fields from Kilranelagh to Whitehall Grove had become well-trodden by the children over the last two years, and the woods that filled the valley between the farm and the estate seemed to have become their world. At the moment, after the arrival of the film The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at the small cinema in Baltinglass three weeks ago, it served as the countryside around St Petersburg, Missouri; the tiny stream at the bottom of the valley, on the other side of the motte, was the Mississippi River. The voices Stefan and Valerie could hear, floating down from the top of the mound, were now those of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Becky Sharp, Joe Harper and, intermittently, of Injun Joe, Muff Potter and Aunt Polly too.

‘I was at Garda Headquarters today,’ said Stefan.

‘Be quiet, Stefan,’ she hissed again.

‘It sounds mad, but I’ve got to go to America.’

She turned round, glaring, holding a finger to her lips.

‘You can tell me later, darling!’ The last word meant nothing very much; it was simply the word Valerie called everyone she cared about.

She continued up the slope. He followed, amused. It was a very different reaction from the ones he had got both at the Garda barracks in Baltinglass and at home. The idea of flying to America was, immediately at least, a prospect of such extraordinary wonder that reasons paled into insignificance, especially where Helena Gillespie was concerned. Stefan’s father smiled and joined in, but he still thought it all sounded very odd.

David Gillespie, like his son, had a policeman’s nose; he could smell the politics too, perhaps as acutely as his son. He had worked in Dublin Castle under the British once, when he was an inspector in the Dublin Metropolitan Police. He picked up the excitement in his son’s voice too. It was something he hadn’t heard in a very long time. He felt that the wind was changing; he could see it in Stefan’s eyes; perhaps it was changing for all of them. He wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, but then the wind and the weather were nobody’s to control.

By now Valerie Lessingham had reached the top of the hill. She crouched down behind a fallen tree, and as Stefan arrived behind her she grabbed his hand and pulled him down. There were no voices now, just the sounds of the rooks overhead, a great crowd of them heading home to roost. Then Tom Sawyer appeared among the bushes across the flat top of the motte, in the form of Tom Gillespie; he was holding Becky Sharp, in the shape of Jane Lessingham, by the hand; things were getting very serious.

‘Becky, I was such a fool!’ lamented Tom. ‘I never thought we might want to come back! I can’t find the way. It’s all mixed up. Don’t cry.’

Becky didn’t look much like crying. Jane was older than Tom Gillespie and she was quite a bit taller – she felt Becky needed to buck her ideas up; crying wouldn’t get them out of the cave they were lost in.

‘Tom, if you can’t find your way out of here, I will!’

‘That’s not right, Jane. It’s Tom who gets them out!’

‘I don’t see why it always has to be that way.’

‘It’s in the film. It’s in the book too.’

Suddenly there was a loud whooping noise, then crashing through the undergrowth came Harry Lawlor, as Injun Joe, his belt tied round his head and a pigeon’s feather sticking out of his headband, and screaming loudly.

‘I’m a-going to get you, Tom Sawyer! I’m a-going to get you!’

‘Becky, run, it’s Injun Joe!’

Tom put his fist up to defend Becky, who scowled and looked like she was perfectly capable of protecting herself, but before Harry reached his prey a small figure wearing a wide-brimmed, very torn straw hat, flung himself at Injun Joe. Alex Lessingham, more accurately Huckleberry Finn, was coming to the rescue. Tom Gillespie clenched his fists and shouted.

‘That’s not what happens!’

‘Who cares?’ said Jane.

She ran. Injun Joe followed.

‘Come on, Tom, let’s go!’ said Huck, racing off. And Tom ran after them, laughing, finally abandoning accuracy for fun.

Valerie got up, laughing too, pulling Stefan up on to the mound by the hand. The voices of the children echoed through the darkening trees for a moment longer, and then there was silence again.

‘Come on, you lot!’ shouted Valerie.

‘Tom, we’ve to get back! Tea’ll be ready! Harry needs to go too!’

‘Jane, Alex, it’s almost dark!’

‘Tom! I mean it!’

Valerie sniggered.

‘What’s that for?’

‘I mean it, indeed! Sure, don’t you put the fear of God into them?’

‘They’ll have us standing here all night, Valerie.’

‘Really?’ She took his hand.

He pulled it back.

‘Don’t be so daft.’

She giggled. They walked on a few steps.

‘Did you say you had to go to America?’

‘New York.’

‘What on earth for?’

Out of the twilight four forms launched themselves at Stefan and Valerie, leaping up and pulling them down to the ground, laughing and whooping, in whatever characters they still carried in their heads. Tom and Harry Lawlor pinned Stefan to the ground; Jane and Alex held their mother down, demanding immediate surrender and a considerable ransom. But after a few moments the hostages were released. As they all got up, Valerie grabbed at the severely battered and torn straw hat that had fallen off her son’s head. She frowned a frown of considerable severity.

‘And who did this?’

The children looked at one another and said nothing.

‘This came out of my bedroom. It was new last year. Look at it!’

‘It’s like Huckleberry Finn’s hat,’ muttered Alex.

‘It certainly is now,’ replied his mother. ‘Who did it, please?’

Tom stepped forward, his head hanging down.

‘We were going to put it back, Mrs Lessingham.’

‘Oh, well, that’s all right then.’ Her voice was still very stern.

‘I only cut it a bit, so it looked right. But it’s got quare ripped now.’

‘Quare ripped indeed, Tomás Gillespie!’

She put her arm round Tom; then she put the hat on her head.

‘So what do you think?’

As Valerie and her children walked down the track through the woods, Stefan turned towards the farm with Tom and Harry. The boys climbed over the fence into the field and walked on. He realised he hadn’t explained anything at all to her yet. He called out in the near darkness.

‘I’m leaving for New York tomorrow!’

‘How long will you be?’

‘Five days, six. I’m flying.’

‘What? You still haven’t told me why.’

‘I’ll catch you in the morning, Valerie!’

‘I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow. I’ll see what –’

She was gone from sight; her voice had gone too, fading into the trees. He wasn’t sure how much she had heard but when he clambered over the fence it was clear Tom had heard enough. He stood with a look of bewilderment and awe on his face, waiting for his father; it was a look shared by Harry Lawlor too. The Mississippi had disappeared from view.

5. Inns Quay

That evening, after tea, Tom Gillespie brought down the newspaper cuttings he had collected earlier in the year about the flying boats that had just taken to the air, flying out of Ireland, across the Atlantic, to America. It was a wonder that no one could have dreamt of, even a few years ago. There were photographs of the planes, gigantic yet graceful; a great, wide, heavy wing of engines and propellers, with the sleek lines of a ship hanging underneath, cutting down into the waters of the River Shannon as they landed at Foynes. There were men in the navy-like uniforms of Pan American Airways and Imperial Airways, names that on their own conjured up for Tom all the vastness of the earth. There was a map that showed the route the flying boats would take, from Southampton Water on the English Channel across England and Wales, across the Irish sea and all of Ireland to Foynes on the Shannon Estuary; from Foynes over the whole of the North Atlantic, the longest, barely imaginable leg of the journey, to Botwood in Newfoundland; then across the Gulf of St Lawrence and down through Canada and New England to New York, the city of skyscrapers that Tom had only seen in newsreels; a city that felt like it was on another planet.

The atlas was pulled out to join the cuttings, and for more than an hour the farmhouse on the western edge of the Wicklow Mountains was open to the skies and the oceans and a light that seemed to shine on all the distance in the tiny maps and make it almost tangible. David and Helena too were swept up in the adventure that filled their grandson’s head, and when Tom finally went up to bed he had exhausted them all with his excitement. He felt as if he was going too.

For a moment even Tom’s father had forgotten that the man he was going to bring back from New York, on the return leg of that great adventure, might be coming home to meet the English hangman.

And the hangman was still English. Despite the fact that two years earlier, in Éamon de Valera’s new constitution, the Irish Free State had officially been renamed Éire, Ireland, and that it considered itself now, for all practical purposes, a republic, there was still one job no Irishman would ever be asked to do in Ireland. So when that job did need doing it was the English hangman, Thomas Pierrepoint, who took the boat train from Euston, the mail boat from Holyhead, and a taxi from Dún Laoghaire to Mountjoy Prison.

Stefan was thinking about what his journey meant now, as his mother and father washed up. He folded up his son’s newspaper cuttings and put them away in the Cadbury’s chocolate box that had a picture of a flying boat pasted on it; he closed the box and put it aside to go back to Tom’s room.

As he returned to the kitchen the telephone rang. It was Valerie Lessingham, her voice bright as always, pushing away what was in his mind.

‘Stefan, I only got a bit of what you said. How long are you away?’

‘It’s not even a week.’

‘I have to be in Dublin tomorrow. So I’m going up there anyway. I thought I might drive you. You said you’d be staying the night. I could too.’

In a relationship that largely revolved around their children, the time Stefan and Valerie had actually spent alone together didn’t amount to much. When the chance did arise, Valerie dealt with it simply enough. Where Stefan approached it all with caution, she just got on with it.

He laughed. ‘Well, I suppose if you’re going anyway.’

It was unlikely she had been going anyway but, like the practical woman she was, there would, naturally, be things she had to do in Dublin.

As he walked back into the kitchen the last dishes were being dried and put away. His father and mother looked round. In a household where the telephone was still a novelty, an explanation was always expected. Stefan would rather it hadn’t been expected right now. It was an area of his life where the less said, especially as far as his mother was concerned, the better.

‘Valerie Lessingham’s got to be in Dublin tomorrow. She’s going to give me a lift up.’

David Gillespie nodded and turned to put a cup in the press. Helena’s pursed lips told another story. Open skies were forgotten.

‘Well, as usual, there’s nothing much happens here that Mrs Lessingham doesn’t want a part in. I suppose we should be used to it.’

David shot a warning glance at his wife, but she took no notice.

‘Normally it’s Tom of course.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ said Stefan. His irritation was defensive; he wanted to tell her to mind her own business. His father shot him the same warning glance he had shot Helena, and it had the same effect. ‘Leave it alone, Ma. You know no one could be kinder to Tom.’

‘And what does he think about that?’

‘What?’

Helena turned to the range, taking off her apron and folding it very purposefully, several times, before she hung it over the rail to dry.

‘Think about what? You know what he thinks. He loves being at Whitehall Grove, and he loves it when Jane and Alex come here. They have a grand time, don’t they? Leave it at that!’ He knew perfectly well why she wouldn’t leave it at that, at least he thought he did. ‘Valerie gives him more time than anyone outside this house. He thinks the world of her! Why not?’

His mother still had her back to him.

‘Why not indeed? I’m sure she’s an angel come among us!’

Even David Gillespie thought this was unnecessary.

‘Helena, will you come on? That’s enough.’

She turned, smiling now, but it wasn’t a smile of agreement. It was a smile that said she had more to say, and obviously no one wanted to hear it.

‘Probably it is. Trust me to blow out the candle when it’s burning so bright.’ She walked across to Stefan and kissed his cheek. ‘You’ll need an early night, son. You’ve a lot to do. I’m sure there’s more to all that travelling than they say. It’s still a long way, however quickly you get there.’

She walked out and went upstairs.

Stefan sat down at the table. He looked down at the picture of the flying boat. There had been times, more times recently, even before the call to Dublin, when he had felt he needed to get away. It had nothing to do with Valerie Lessingham, or with his mother’s tight-lipped disapproval, or even the slow repetitiveness of his life; it had nothing to do with his family really. It was the feeling that sometimes the mountains around him closed in, watching him grow older, watching his son grow up as he did no more than mark time.

David Gillespie went to the press and brought out two bottles of beer. He stood pouring them, saying nothing for a while. He pushed a glass across to his son and then pulled out a chair on the other side of the table.

‘She’s thinking of Tom,’ he said finally, as he sat down.

‘I know what she’s thinking of, Pa.’

‘Well, that’s another thing altogether,’ David frowned. ‘There is that too. She’s another man’s wife. We’ve never talked about it before, whatever we think, but do you expect your mother to be easy with it? Or me, Stefan?’

‘Does it matter so much?’

‘It matters,’ said his father. ‘You know it does. I’m sure Mrs Lessingham knows it. It’s the children that matter most. You know that too.’

‘What do you think we are? I could count the number –’

‘You can give each other the explanations. Don’t waste them on me.’

Stefan felt the sting in his father’s quiet words.

‘That’s not what really worries your mother anyway. I’m not saying she hasn’t got an opinion about it that doesn’t reflect very well on you or Mrs Lessingham, but all that can’t go on. Sure, you know that yourself.’

For a moment Stefan drank; he did know, of course he knew.

‘It’ll stop,’ he said, gazing down at the glass. ‘These things do.’

‘These things?’ laughed David. ‘Is that all it amounts to? Maybe it’s when it stops that your mother’s worried about. Can’t you understand that?’

‘For God’s sake, I think I’m old enough to deal with it, Pa!’

‘I’m glad for you so. I’m glad for Valerie Lessingham too, if that’s how it is with her. It’s a good job your mother’s in bed. If she was here she’d tell you she couldn’t give a feck whether you two can deal with it or not.’

Stefan laughed, but he could see this wasn’t one of those familiar moments when David Gillespie had been despatched by his wife to say what she wouldn’t say herself.

‘And what sort of sense is that supposed to make? If she doesn’t care, then what the hell is she so angry about?’ He drained his glass and stood up.

‘Jesus, you’re thick sometimes, Stefan Gillespie. He thinks the world of her, that’s what you said. Not that it needs saying. You might be able to deal with it when it’s all over, do you think Tom’s going to find it so easy? She’s pulled him into her family, and I’ve no complaint about that, nor has your mother.’

Stefan gave a wry smile; he wasn’t so sure about that.

‘Maybe she’s a way with strays,’ continued David, with a kinder expression. ‘But you and Mrs Lessingham have taken a road you can’t stay on together. There’ll be a parting, and when there is things won’t be the same again. Perhaps there’ll be more for Tom to lose than you then.’

Stefan stood where he was, looking at his father, as two compartments in his mind opened up to one another, and he realised that not only were they sitting side by side, they looked into each other. He had become very good at keeping things in separate boxes in the years since Maeve had died; he was aware of that. But it was a trick his son had had no reason to learn.

*

In Bewley’s Café in Grafton Street the next evening, Stefan Gillespie and Valerie Lessingham talked about the things they usually talked about: first, their children. It was not only what was closest to their hearts, and what held them together, it was where they found the happiest parts of who they were. Tom was at the National School at Kilranelagh, a mile along the road from the farm. Jane and Alexander were at Stratford Lodge, the Church of Ireland school in Baltinglass. But their closest friendships were with each other, and with Harry Lawlor who was at school with Tom and also inhabited the woods between Kilranelagh and Whitehall Grove. Other topics could be almost as amusing for Stefan and Valerie, some of the time, but there was too often something less than funny below the surface that could rise up to still the easy laughter.

The chaos that was the Whitehall Grove estate was never really as entertaining as Valerie Lessingham made it out to be, though she was good at finding the humour in it. The estate was in serious decline, propped up by Major Lessingham’s army salary and the selling of assets that had once been considered the family jewels. Valerie still talked to Stefan about her husband with the fond exasperation that she had before they became lovers. She needed someone to talk to; Stefan was a friend first and what else they were to each other now didn’t change that. He wasn’t sure why she wanted to speak about her husband tonight. It wasn’t an unfamiliar conversation, but there was concern behind it, preoccupation, even worry. It was as if she was refocusing her mind, all of it, with a quiet intensity that was unlike her.

‘Simon always prattles on about how passionately he’s attached to the land and the house. The family’s been there for over three hundred years and all that, but he’s got no idea how the estate survives. Farming’s still a complete mystery to him. As far as he’s concerned grass grows, corn ripens, sheep lamb, cows calve, and we all live on it merrily! The fact is it’s a business and it’s eating up far more money than it’s making. And every conversation we have, every letter I get from him, is just another version of: Sure, it’ll all be all right. It’ll all be grand. It will all sort itself out!’

‘He’s not an Irishman for nothing,’ smiled Stefan.

‘Isn’t he? I’m not sure what he’s an Irishman for at all!’

Stefan didn’t reply. He could see the tension behind her words.

‘Sometimes I don’t know where he fits. In England he’s Irish and he champions Irish independence so aggressively he offends all his English friends. When he’s at home he defends England and doesn’t understand why all his Irish friends just want him to shut up. I don’t know where he belongs. I’m English. I never wanted to live here at all really, but I know more about Ireland now than he does. The only place he feels at home is with his regiment, whether it’s in England or East Africa or India. He’s spent more time away from us since I came to Whitehall Grove than he has with us.’

‘You know there’s not a farmer who isn’t struggling.’ Stefan said it reassuringly, but he knew the problems at Whitehall Grove were bigger than most farmers faced. He had tried to help with advice, but the place had its own creaking system of management that advice couldn’t change.

‘I wish the IRA hadn’t stopped burning down big houses. That would be the ideal answer. I was thinking of approaching Cumann na mBan directly to see if there was a waiting list I could get Whitehall Grove put on.’

She laughed the kind of careless laugh that she was so good at. Stefan still felt it was less careless than usual. But he didn’t ask her if anything else was wrong. If she wanted to tell him, she would tell him. They ate for several minutes in silence. Stefan was less easy with his life than he had been two days ago. And somehow it seemed the same for her. He felt it as they spoke. Something was changing.

They walked across O’Connell Bridge and turned along the Quays towards the hotel. They were staying at the Four Courts Hotel on Inns Quay, just along from Kingsbridge Station, where Stefan would be getting the train to Foynes the next morning. It was a cold night. Valerie’s arm was through his as it could never have been in Baltinglass. It was such a simple thing; but he missed it; a woman with her arm through his. It wasn’t very often that he allowed himself to look at the empty corners of his life. When he did he dismissed them with a wry grin or a few swear words, and usually it worked; but it was always something small that put the thought in his head, something like Valerie Lessingham’s arm now. They hadn’t spoken for a while. He was easier with silence than she was. But this silence was hers.

‘There will be a war. I really think so, don’t you?’

She spoke quite suddenly. It wasn’t such an odd topic to introduce, but Stefan wasn’t really sure where it had come from. Talk of war was everywhere. Most people had an opinion, even if in Ireland they were quick to shrug the idea off and change the subject; it wasn’t Ireland’s business anyway. What opinions there were, voiced or unvoiced, changed from day to day, with the news from Germany and Britain and Europe.

The belief that once Adolf Hitler’s demands were met, surely not entirely unreasonable demands after all, the dark clouds of conflict would blow away was strong in Ireland. The desire not to take sides, in what was increasingly seen as a confrontation between Britain and Germany, never mind the other countries in Europe threatened by Nazi expansion, had become a statement of nationhood. Independence and neutrality seemed to mean the same thing; too much criticism of Germany was seen as forelock-tugging subservience to Britain.

Stefan Gillespie’s views on Nazi Germany had little to do with forelock tugging. His mother’s family was German; he had been there himself. For him what was wrong in Germany wasn’t about Britain. But his opinions were not very popular; he had got used to not expressing them very loudly.

‘You know I’ve always thought that,’ he said quietly.

‘Simon doesn’t think it’s going to be very long. His last letter –’

‘He’s probably right.’

‘The regiment’s coming back from Kenya. They sail next week.’

‘Is that unexpected?’

‘They were meant to stay in East Africa till November.’

He nodded, but it didn’t feel like this conversation was about the war.

‘He won’t be coming home. I mean I’m sure he’ll come over at some point when he’s back in England, but it feels, well, he says it feels like something’s going to happen soon. We all know, we all damned well know!’

There was a stress in her voice that was unlike her.

They walked on in silence again. She held him tighter.

‘I can’t stay, Stefan. I wanted to tell you –’

He wasn’t sure what she was talking about; it felt like it could have been that night, but even before she spoke again, he knew it wasn’t at all.

‘I think I have to be where he is. I mean, I don’t know where he’ll be, but in England, I think I have to be in England. I’m not sure it’s what I want, for the children, even for me. Whatever’s happened between Simon and me, however far apart we’ve become – we have, I know we have. But I think I have to do what’s right now. He doesn’t agree. He doesn’t want us to leave Ireland at all. Obviously we’d all be safer here, but it matters more that we’re where – I mean I – I’m not putting it very well, am I?’

‘I think you’re putting it very well.’

It was strange, but he felt very close to her now.

‘I’m going to shut up the house and let the land. That way the estate will just about pay for itself. It means letting people go, and I’m not very happy about that. I know the children are going to hate it. My mother has a house in Sussex. It’s not huge, but we’ll all fit, just about. I wanted to tell you. I wanted you to understand. I think he needs us. He’d never say it. Perhaps it’s the first time he really needs us. He says he doesn’t want me to do any of this. But I am going to do it, Stefan. I hope it makes some sense?’

‘You don’t need to explain it all to me, Valerie.’

He knew she did of course; they were friends first.

They stopped. She turned towards him. She wasn’t a woman who cried; he wasn’t sure he had ever seen her cry. She was always bright, always laughing. Yet there were tears in her eyes now. He held her close. It was what she needed him to do. She turned her face up. They kissed, unaware of people around them, of traffic; unaware, it seemed, of the words just spoken. They said nothing as they walked into the Four Courts Hotel.

*

It was one o’clock in the morning when Stefan Gillespie woke up. Someone was hammering on the door of the hotel room. Valerie, in a deeper sleep, stirred next to him, then turned over. The hammering continued, a fist thumping rhythmically. He got out of bed, fumbling for clothes. He didn’t turn the lamp on. The banging stopped and a voice called through the door.

‘Wake the fuck up, Sergeant!’

He didn’t recognise the voice.

The fist started thumping again, slowly and impatiently. He walked to the door, doing up his trousers. The light by the bed suddenly went on.

‘What is it?’

Valerie was sitting up now.

‘God knows.’

He walked to the door and opened it slightly. The round, red face of Superintendent Gregory smiled in at him through the crack, so close that Stefan could taste the breath of whiskey and cigarettes coming off him.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you, Sergeant.’

Gregory pushed hard against the door, and although Stefan stopped it opening fully, it opened wide enough for the Special Branch superintendent to see past him to the bed. Valerie was surprised, but unflustered. She simply pulled the bedclothes up and smiled pleasantly at the unknown man.

‘I didn’t know you had friends dropping in, darling?’

‘What the hell do you want?’ demanded Stefan.

‘There’s a bit of news, Stevie.’

Stefan stared at him, only now really fully awake.

‘Still, I did knock, that’s something. I’ll be in the bar.’

The smile had gone; the last words were an order.

Superintendent Gregory was sitting in the empty bar of the Four Courts Hotel when Stefan came down. He had a glass of whiskey in front of him. The sour, just woken night porter stood behind the bar next to a bottle.

‘Will you have a drink?’ said Gregory.

‘I won’t,’ was all Stefan replied as he sat down.

The superintendent turned to the night porter.

‘You can piss off now. Leave the bottle.’

The night porter put the bottle of Bushmills down on the table in front of the Special Branch man and walked back to the hotel lobby. The superintendent topped up his glass and then lit a cigarette. He took a few moments to do this. Stefan knew the game well enough; he thought Gregory wasn’t especially good at it.

‘I didn’t think there was a Mrs Gillespie?’

‘I’m flattered I’m worth finding out about, sir.’

‘I wouldn’t be too flattered. I like to know who I’m dealing with, that’s all. Still, it’s a relief to see a Mrs Gillespie of some sort on the hotel register. We’ve all been a bit concerned how friendly you are with your pals at the Gate, Messrs Mac Liammóir and Edwards. And she’s quite a looker.’

The game had to go on, and Stefan Gillespie decided it was better to let it run its course than to tell the Special Branch superintendent to fuck himself. Gregory was enjoying the fact that he had something on him; it was how the detective branch worked; with Special Branch it was almost the only way they did anything. The more you had on people, your colleagues included, the stronger you were. Stefan knew he used the same methods himself, though perhaps he didn’t use them in the same way. Favours and threats, knowing what other people didn’t know, the little nuggets of information you carried in your head until you had reasons to use them – it was part of the armoury, and the higher up you went, the more it mattered. If Terry Gregory didn’t quite know what to make of this country sergeant who didn’t seem to behave like a country sergeant should, it didn’t matter. He had something on him.

‘My father was always suspicious of Wicklow people. He said they’re all in bed with the English too much down there. That was a long time ago, but maybe he was right so. Course, you’re a Protestant yourself, aren’t you? Well, I suppose that makes it all right, you being in bed with the English.’

Gregory laughed, stubbing his cigarette and taking out another. He knew exactly who Valerie Lessingham was. He wanted Stefan to know he knew.

‘Isn’t her husband in the British army?’

‘I’m glad you’ve got time to investigate me, sir, when there’s so much on, but if there’s anything else you want to know, you can ask. It might save you some time. I know you’re busy. What’s happening with the investigation? Is there any news about Mrs Harris’s body yet?’

Superintendent Gregory shook his head.

‘Don’t try to fuck a fucker, son.’

But the game was over.

‘Ned Broy had a telegram from Mr McCauley, New York. It seems our Mr Harris wasn’t as enthusiastic about an invitation to come home for a chat as everyone thought. Not as I’d want to tell Ned I told him so, but I did.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s gone. Not the biggest surprise, and I’m glad to say one that I don’t have any fecking responsibility for at all. I can kick that one upstairs.’

‘What happened?’

‘He walked out of the hotel, that’s all. And why wouldn’t he if he’s worked out what might be waiting for him in Dublin? So now he’s gone, the consul’s had to tell the New York police that we parked an axe-murderer in a hotel room with a bunch of queers to keep an eye on him, and never even mentioned it. And they were all worried about what we’d look like if something got into the American papers! I suppose we should be running the rosary through our fingers and praying Owen doesn’t get hold of an axe.’

He grinned. He was clearly taking some satisfaction in all this.

‘So does that mean I don’t go?’

‘Oh no, Stevie, the plane’s all booked.’

‘But I thought you –’

‘It’s not my mess. The Commissioner seems to think the NYPD will pick him up quick enough, so the job’s still the same. You might want to take a pair of handcuffs with you for the journey back though. Of course the NYPD will be pissed off. We’ve been playing the bollocks on their patch, however much we tell them it was all about Owen Harris doing us all a favour and helping us with our enquiries. They will know better by now.’

‘So what am I supposed to do?’ said Stefan.

‘Turn up and wait till they find him.’

‘And if they don’t?’

‘I’d say they will. No one seems to think he’s much in his head. But the lad might want to go easy over there. They’re as likely to shoot him as look at him, knowing what he’s done.’ Gregory laughed. ‘The place is full of Irish cops who love their mammies after all. They won’t take to him, I’d say. Not that anyone here would be too bothered if he came back in a coffin –’

‘I thought nobody really wanted me to go to New York –’

‘Now everybody wants you to go, me included.’

‘In case it’s a fuck up?’

‘Got it in one. You’re a bright lad, Stevie. But it’s already a fuck up. McCauley’s fuck up in New York, Ned Broy’s here. I don’t intend to make it mine. So the grand thing about you is you’re nobody. You don’t matter.’

‘What about the NYPD?’

‘What do they care? They’ll deliver you a prisoner, or if we’re lucky a box. And you’ve got the trip to look forward to, a hotel in New York. Jesus, you’ll be the toast of the sheep shaggers for miles around when you get back to Baltinglass. And it’s not all bad news, Sergeant. If you could maybe make it a box, you might even be up for promotion. It’d save on the trial and for my money, well, if I had to choose between being shot and being hanged –’

Terry Gregory drained the whiskey in his glass and stood up.

‘It’s an ill wind, eh Sergeant?’

He walked out to the lobby and into the street.

In the room Valerie was sitting up, reading. She laughed as Stefan came in.

‘What was all that about?’

‘The man I’ve got to bring back from New York has disappeared.’

‘So aren’t you going?’

‘They’ll find him. Well, that’s what the superintendent said.’

He shrugged. She said no more. As he sat down on the bed she stretched out her hand to touch his back. He sat there for a moment, not moving, feeling her fingers. He was aware how much he liked her. That was the thought in his head that made him smile. It wasn’t love between them, it never had been, but it wasn’t nothing, for either of them. He turned round and reached across the bed, stroking her hair. As he kissed her she pulled him slowly down on to her. Neither of them needed to speak now to know that this would be the last time they would make love.

6. West Thirty-Sixth Street
New York

Longie Zwillman stood at the counter in the window of Lindy’s diner on Broadway, between 49th and 50th. He kept his hat on and his overcoat done up, though it was warm enough in Lindy’s. He was thirty-five; he didn’t look older but somehow people felt he was older. There was age behind his eyes, and behind the half smile that was almost always on his lips there was nothing that suggested he found very much to laugh at. He was drinking the cup of coffee and eating the cheesecake Clara Lindermann had brought him personally.

It was busy in Lindy’s, but there was space at the window where Zwillman stood looking out, seemingly at nothing in particular. The two big men in homburgs who stood behind him would have made sure there was space, because Longie didn’t like people too close to him; even in a New York diner he expected the courtesy of space. But they didn’t have to make room for him. There was something about the way Longie held himself, and the way he looked at people when they came near him, that ensured he rarely had to ask for anything. He was a courteous man though; he seemed to inspire courtesy in others. Broadway wasn’t his territory; neither was Manhattan. He had come over from New Jersey. But he was respected here as he was respected everywhere. The work he had today crossed no lines. It wasn’t business. It was pest control, and he had an interest in that.

Outside the window, across the sidewalk, a truck stopped. It was a fish truck, one of the hundreds that pulled in and out of Fulton Market every night. The driver looked through the window at the man in the overcoat, eating the last forkful of Lindy’s cheesecake. Zwillman nodded. The truck drove on.

Longie finished his coffee and walked out on to Broadway, followed by the two big men. He sauntered down towards Times Square. He went almost unnoticed in the afternoon crowds bustling up and down around him, but not entirely. Several people recognised him and nodded respectfully. He nodded in return. Several times men walked up to him and spoke, in low tones of respect, asking after his health and the health of his family. They waited for him to stretch out his hand before they attempted to shake his. Two NYPD officers were among those who stopped and received an invitation to shake that hand.

In all the unseeing and indifferent noise of Broadway, Longie Zwillman walked like a secret island of calm and courtesy, or so it seemed. He knew who every one of the people who greeted him was, even out of his own fiefdom; and they were grateful for it. To know him and to be known by him was something. To lose those small favours was something else; after all respect and fear weren’t very different.

There was the beginning of darkness in the grey March sky over Times Square, and the lights all along Broadway were beginning to push the trash and the seedy corners out of sight. Crowds jammed around the 42nd Street subway as the people heading home from work met the people coming out to the theatres and movies, restaurants and clubs, or to do what most people did on Broadway, to be there and to walk about.

Pushing up from the subway, through the hundreds of New Yorkers streaming down, was a group of men, a dozen or so, all beered up for the evening in advance. They were rowdy already, laughing loudly and looking around with a kind of purpose and anticipation they seemed to find funny and exciting all at the same time; they were their own entertainment. But there was an aggression in their laughter that was more than just a bunch of guys with too much beer inside them. Several of them carried bundles of newspapers; one carried a furled flag; another carried billboards. Two of the men wore distinctive silver-grey shirts with a large L on the left side, in scarlet, close to the heart; the uniform of the Silver Legion of America. When they stopped on the corner of Broadway and 43rd they were quieter, gathering around the flags.

The newspapers were handed out, the billboards propped against a store front, the flags unfurled. The flag was the red L on silver; L for the Legion, L for Loyalty, L for Liberation. The placards bore scrawled headlines from the newspapers the men were selling: Social Justice, Liberation, National American. ‘Buy Christian Say No to Jew York!’ ‘Keep Us out of England’s War!’ ‘The Protocols of Zion and the End of America!’ ‘Roosevelt Public Enemy Number One!’ They moved along Broadway in twos and threes, hawking their papers, and shouting the headlines.

They were all New Yorkers, with names like other New Yorkers; mostly they were German and Irish names. But they weren’t only there to sell; they were looking for the enemies of America in the streets of their city; anyone they thought might be a Jew.

Dan Walker was already bored calling the headlines of the papers he never read anyway. He wanted another beer. Van Nosdall was a lot keener, thrusting out blue mimeographed slips as he moved through the crowds. ‘There’s only room for one “ism” in America, Americanism!’ ‘Democracy, Jewocracy!’ ‘Hey, Yid, no one wants you here! We’re coming for you!’ As he screamed ‘Coming for you!’ at an elderly couple, heading to the theatre, he formed his fingers into a pistol and laughed. ‘Pow!’ Dan Walker yawned.

‘Let’s get a beer for Christ’s sake!’

Then he stopped and smiled.

‘See the piece of shit there –’

He was looking at a boy of sixteen or seventeen, with a thin face and large, dark eyes. Anyone would have said he was Jewish. You could always tell a Jew of course, but this one was Jewish Jewish. He was staring at the two men with real anger in his face, and he wasn’t moving; he wasn’t trying to run the way he was supposed to. Dan Walker walked forward, with new enthusiasm for the slogans he had been leaving to Van Nosdall till now. He walked up to the youth, who was standing his ground, quietly unyielding.

‘Read Social Justice and learn how to solve the Jewish question.’

The Jewish youth nodded, unexpectedly.

‘OK, I’ll take one.’

It was an odd response; he should have already been running.

Dan Walker looked round at Van Nosdall.

Nosdall shrugged. He handed over a copy of Social Justice, and the youth handed him some change. As he opened the paper the youth glanced at the contents, with a look of deep seriousness. He turned a page.

‘I’ve been reading Father Coughlin’s articles about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s certainly some piece of work, some piece of work.’

He folded the newspaper up and put it in his pocket.

‘I’ve never seen shit like it. So this is what I’m going to do – I’m going to take it home and wipe my arse with every last, lying, fucking page.’

With that he ran, out into Broadway, through the traffic.

Dan Walker and Van Nosdall were already running after him. The bundle of papers was dropped. Dan put his fingers in his mouth and whistled shrilly. This was what they were all waiting for, this was real politics. And while a couple of men remained behind to pick up the newspapers the whole gang that had emerged from the subway only ten minutes earlier was racing through the blasting horns in pursuit of the young Jew. They had one now. And as long as they kept him in sight, they would run till they caught him.

He was in west 44th Street now, heading towards the Shubert Theatre. The street was quiet after Broadway and 7th Avenue; the theatres weren’t open yet. He looked round. They weren’t far behind. The other men had almost caught up with the two he had spoken to already. There were at least a dozen of them. He turned right abruptly, into the alley that ran between the Shubert Theatre and the Broadhurst. The gates were open. He stopped for a moment, catching his breath, and walked between the two theatres for a moment.

It was dark here now, and it was a dead end. At the top of the alleyway Dan Walker and Van Nosdall were standing, watching him. The youth turned round, and stood looking up at them. The other men were there now. They grouped together, extracting a variety of batons and coshes and knuckle dusters from their coats, grinning and joshing one another. They produced a wailing wolf-like howl, all together, and started to walk down the alley towards the Jew.

He seemed remarkably, unaccountably unafraid.

Quite suddenly a door out from the back of the Broadhurst Theatre opened. The youth gave a wave to the advancing party and walked into the theatre. The door closed. The men ran forward. It was a fire exit; it was heavy, blank; it had no lock or handle on the outside. Two of the newspaper sellers hammered on the door.

At first only one man turned round and looked back up the alley. A truck had just stopped there and in the light from 44th Street he could see a gang of men getting out of the back. Some of the others were looking round now; then they all were.

The whole street end of the alleyway was blocked by a small crowd; there were a lot of men there, twenty-five, thirty. They carried baseball bats and pickaxe handles. There was complete silence for some seconds. No one was hammering on the Broadhurst fire door now; no one was laughing. The men from the fish truck filled the alleyway. They moved in a line towards the men from the Silver Legion and the Christian Front, looking for healthy political debate.

On West 44th Street Longie Zwillman’s Pontiac passed the fish truck. The driver, closing the back doors, touched his cap as the car approached.

The Pontiac carried on into Broadway.

*

There wasn’t much that was old in New York. Keens Chophouse on West 36th Street was as old as most places that were still standing. It had been there long enough that clay pipes still hung from the ceiling where long-dead customers had kept them. It smelled of old wood in a city where that smell was barely known. John Cavendish sat upstairs on the raised platform in front of the small-paned windows that gave on to 36th Street.

It was still early and there were few customers, but those there were, were kept well away from the table the Irish army officer was sitting at. It was Longie Zwillman’s table. Cavendish waited. He had been there for half an hour. It wasn’t a problem. Half an hour to sit and do nothing was welcome; half an hour to sit and think of something other than what he was doing. He thought of his wife and his children in Rathmines. It would be another two months before he went home. It was hard. He didn’t often let himself think about how hard it was. Whatever New York was, there were moments when it really wasn’t much at all, if you only stopped long enough to take a breath.

They talked for half an hour about nothing in particular: how old their children were; what was the most impressive thing at the World’s Fair; the news from Europe. They were almost strangers but for reasons neither of them was entirely sure about they trusted one another. Each had information the other wanted, or at least had some chance of getting it. As the main course arrived Longie Zwillman took out an envelope. Inside were several small photographs. He fanned them out on the table like playing cards. There was a brownstone building, cars, half a dozen men going into the building or coming out. Some faces were very clear, some indistinct.

‘This is the German bookstore on 116th Street. There’s a lot of stuff distributed there, not just American Nazi Party pamphlets and Bund papers, but pretty much any pro-German, Roosevelt’s-a-commie, anti-Semitic, democracy-will-eat-your-kids crap you can think of. Silver Legion, Christian Front, Social Justice, National American. You’ve seen all that already.’

‘Some of it.’

‘You’ve seen some, you’ve seen the lot. They got a meeting hall upstairs. Same people, same crap. Some of my boys keep an eye on it, to see who’s making all the noise. I got some friends who like me to do that. So it’s a favour. Also it’s where they get together to maybe go out and beat some Jews up, or just some people they don’t like, who mainly happen to be Jews. But that’s not compulsory, Jewish I mean. There’s a lot of people they don’t like. As an American I don’t regard that as entirely reasonable behaviour.’

Longie Zwillman shrugged. Captain Cavendish looked at the photos.

‘Anyone you know?’

The intelligence officer picked up four of the photographs.

‘James Stewart,’ he said, laying one of them down again. ‘I know him. He’s a Clan na Gael man in the Bronx. I wouldn’t have said he was that important, but he is close to Dominic Carroll. He raises a lot of money that goes to the IRA. He has a cousin who’s an anti-Roosevelt congressman –’

‘He’s a Christian Front man now as well,’ said Zwillman. ‘He’s not out in the street, but he’s been at some meetings where they put together a bunch of street fighters, mostly German and Irish. He says a lot of them are ex-IRA.’

‘I wouldn’t take too much notice of that. Give me a dollar for every Irishman in New York who was in the IRA and I could buy up Manhattan.’

John Cavendish put down another card.

‘Joseph McWilliams. I’ve seen him at a few Irish-American bashes. He’s big on anti-British campaigns of one sort or another, that’s all I know. But I wouldn’t have said he’s anybody big in Irish-American politics now.’

‘He’s big on the German side.’ Zwillman spoke again. ‘He speaks at a lot of Bund meetings, about Germany and Ireland – together against the British and the Jews. I guess you know how that goes. Maybe he’s a useful go-between. He speaks good German too. This meeting was no rally for the masses, though. This was small; a dozen people, Irish and German. He’s a somebody somewhere.’

Cavendish nodded; it was good information. He put down the next photo.

‘This one’s a man called Aaron Phelan. Clan na Gael organiser from Queens, and an NYPD captain. He’s also as pally as you can get with Dominic Carroll. And you know who he is now – Clan na Gael president.’

‘And the IRA’s man in New York.’

‘That’s him. If Phelan’s there, Carroll is involved in it too.’

‘So who’s left?’

The G2 man put down the last of the four photographs.

‘An old friend,’ he smiled. ‘I knew he was in New York. It’s interesting to see he’s not just giving speeches at Hibernian Club dinners.’

‘Who is he?’

‘He’s the IRA chief of staff, Seán Russell.’

‘So what are they all talking about, the German Bund and the IRA?’

John Cavendish shook his head.

Zwillman picked up the photographs.

‘I’ve got some friends who’ll want a look at these too.’

Cavendish knew enough not to ask who Zwillman’s friends were.

‘What about these women?’ said the American.

It sounded like a change of subject, but it wasn’t.

‘It’s going ahead. It’ll be the night after Patrick’s Day.’

‘And will you get the information?’

‘She says the sister’s got it. She knows the key to the ciphers. She knows how they work. If I can get both of them across to Canada –’

‘So when does she deliver?’

‘When they’re on their way.’

‘I want to know what this is about,’ said Longie Zwillman. ‘So do you. I got someone inside the Bund. A good man. They trust him. But he doesn’t know nothing about this meeting with the IRA. Nobody does. That’s not how it is. They’re smart as hell when it comes to dressing up in brown shirts and Sieg-Heiling it all over New York, but their organisation stinks. It’s like a sieve. And you don’t seem to think the IRA’s far behind them –’

‘Some of the time,’ replied Captain Cavendish. ‘It depends –’

‘This has got a smell. That’s where it started. You smelt it and I smelt it. But that’s all we have, a shitty smell. They got it well hid. That means it’s got to be worth hiding. You need to open up those ciphers, Captain. This woman has to deliver the goods. If you can’t get it out of her somebody else is going to have to. No maybe. So how about you keep me posted, John?’

The half smile that was always on Zwillman’s lips was still there. His expression hadn’t changed at all. But John Cavendish was conscious that he was dealing with a man who was used to getting what he wanted and didn’t care what happened along the way. The American wasn’t a man to play games with. He had made a mistake telling him about Kate and Niamh at all. It had been necessary to give information to get information back.

It had never crossed his mind that he risked losing control. But the waters were getting deeper. Now he heard the quiet threat in Longie Zwillman’s voice.

7. The Yankee Clipper
Foynes, Co Limerick

It’s the sheer size of it I couldn’t believe. It’s higher than a house. It’s like a liner, sitting in the water, but it’s the wings and the engines that are so big when you climb up under them to get in. One minute you’re on the water, bumping a bit – bumping quite a lot in fact, and then you’re in the air. We were only over Ireland a few minutes, hardly at all, and then we were over the Atlantic. You look down and the sea just goes on and on forever.

The postcard Stefan Gillespie was writing to Tom was growing in length, and his writing was getting smaller and smaller to fit. He had bought the picture of the Boeing 314 Yankee Clipper at the terminal, but Tom wanted it to be written on the plane and sent from America with an American stamp. The card wouldn’t reach Baltinglass till he was back there himself, but it was crucial that it came in the post as far as his son was concerned; that had an authenticity that the picture alone couldn’t have.

Finishing the card Stefan gazed down at the Atlantic again, as he had been gazing on and off for an hour. At 20,000 feet the sky was clear; there was nothing below except the sea, grey and choppy and unchanging, mile after mile after mile, and the long journey was only beginning. But as Stefan gazed down, that unchanging swell had its own fascination. The flying boat felt smaller now, far smaller than it had tied up beside the pontoon on the Shannon.

The cabin of the Yankee Clipper was divided up into small seating areas, with bulkheads closing them off from one another. The seats were leather, still with the smell of newness about them. The floors were thickly carpeted. Halfway along the length of the main cabin there was a small dining room; two stewards, naval-officer navy now exchanged for gleaming white jackets, were setting the tables for the first sitting of dinner, with crisp linen and silverware. Another steward, passing Stefan’s seat with a bottle of champagne, stopped and topped up the glass at his elbow.

The journey that was all about bringing a man home to hang perhaps had become no less strange in all the self-conscious elegance of the Yankee Clipper. But it was still hard not to smile grimly at the prospect of the return, a pair of handcuffs linking him and his prisoner across the plush leather, and both of them with a glass of champagne in each free hand. Whatever crap Superintendent Gregory had given him the night before at the Four Courts Hotel, he had taken one piece of advice; on the way to Kingsbridge Station he had walked round to the Bridewell Garda station, behind the Four Courts, to get a pair of handcuffs.

The flying boat was by no means full. Most of the passengers were already on the plane when it touched down from Southampton, English and American; only three others had got on with him at Foynes. The service had been in operation for barely a month and many of the passengers were wealthy people flying for the experience rather than because they needed to get to America fast.

The smell of money filled the cabin of the flying boat as distinctively as the smell of new leather and the steaks sizzling in the galley at the back of the fuselage. Several passengers had eyed him curiously as they smiled and said hello, not because they knew who he was, but because they didn’t. There was an atmosphere on board the plane, amidst all the tasteful elegance; if you were on the flight you ought to be important enough to be recognisable; you did have some obligation to be somebody.

Across the aisle from Stefan, in the compartment just in front of the galley, a man in his late fifties or early sixties had been immersed in a pile of newspapers, English and Irish, between scribbling notes in a notebook. He had said hello to Stefan, and remarked on the weather, which was pretty good for the crossing to Newfoundland it seemed, and then he’d got on with what he was doing.

He was a thin man, with a thick sweep of grey, almost silver hair; he had the kind of intense, thoughtful face that always has a frown between the eyebrows, even when it’s smiling. From time to time he whistled tunelessly to himself, not loudly, but loudly enough for it to slightly grate on Stefan. The Yankee Clipper was surprisingly quiet, despite the insistent buzz of the four great engines hanging from the wings above them, endlessly turning the propellers. Then all of a sudden the man folded his pile of newspapers together and reached over to put them on the empty seat opposite him. He closed his notebook, put away his pen, and picked up his champagne. He turned towards Stefan Gillespie with a smile.

‘Sláinte!’

‘Sláinte mhaith,’ replied Stefan.

‘First time?’ asked the man.

‘The very first.’

‘Quite something,’ the man continued, glancing out at the sky.

Stefan nodded.

The man got up and walked across the aisle, stretching out his hand.

‘Dominic Carroll.’

They shook hands.

‘Stefan Gillespie.’

The stranger sat down in the seat opposite him. There was nothing particularly unusual about the way he delivered his name, but Stefan got the impression that he expected it to mean something. As he continued to smile at Stefan it was as if he was waiting for recognition of some kind to dawn. It didn’t, and Dominic Carroll’s smile became a grin for a moment, as if he was aware of his own ego, and could find the room to laugh at it sometimes.

‘Where are you from, Mr Gillespie?’

‘West Wicklow, Baltinglass.’

‘I don’t know it. I could place it probably. I’m just about from County Tyrone, Carrickfergus. We emigrated when I was four, so you see it is just about. I’m a New Yorker, heading home. And where you headed yourself?’

‘New York too.’

‘Business?’

‘Of a sort.’

‘And what sort of business are you in?’

Stefan hesitated. He had had no instructions to keep what he was doing a secret, at least as far as it simply concerned who he was. The details were a different matter. But the fact that he was a policeman didn’t tell anybody anything significant; in fact it provided good reasons, without his appearing rude, for him to keep his business to himself.

‘I’m a guard, a policeman.’

The effect of this on Dominic Carroll was unexpected. He looked puzzled, and if not quite angry, irritated. He didn’t like it at all. Then his expression changed and he smiled, pushing away whatever had been there.

‘I know what a guard is, Mr Gillespie. I’m not a stranger to Ireland.’

He spoke easily, wiping out any traces of the feelings that he hadn’t been able to hide seconds earlier. But he was no longer as relaxed as he had been, and as the conversation continued Stefan couldn’t help feeling he was being watched and weighed up. It was hard to work out what was going on. It wasn’t much now, and if he hadn’t registered those first, unfathomable reactions from the American, he probably wouldn’t have noticed at all. Carroll was suspicious; for some reason he was uneasy that Stefan was a guard.

However, time passed and bit by bit the suspicion seemed to fade. Dominic Carroll was a good talker, and like a lot of good talkers he was used to being listened to. Once it was clear that Stefan Gillespie had nothing to say about his business, other than he was doing a job for the Gardaí and would be meeting some NYPD officers, he left the subject alone, except to announce that he knew almost every senior police officer in New York. As Stefan hadn’t got the faintest idea who he’d be talking to, or what would be happening once he arrived in Manhattan, the string of names, all of them Irish, had little effect. The NYPD was soon forgotten but New York was not.

The man who had been born in Carrickfergus was proud of the city he now lived in. He had no doubt whatsoever that it was the greatest city on the face of the earth and that if there was anywhere that represented the future, the future of everything, it was New York, his city. It was no accident that the greatest World’s Fair the world had ever seen had just opened its gates in New York’s Flushing Meadows. Dominic Carroll had played some part in putting that together. The World’s Fair was the world of tomorrow in a box, tied up with red-white-and-blue, star-spangled ribbon and more magical than the stars in the heavens at night.

‘When you fly west, Mr Gillespie, you’re flying into the future. But it’s not just America’s future. One day we’ll bring that future back to Ireland!’

It was hard not to share his enthusiasm. He seemed to have a lot of business interests, so many that it was a struggle to follow them as he fired out details of his early career, his failures and successes, his various bankruptcies and disasters, in building and finance and property speculation. At one point it seemed he had been responsible for building most of the skyscrapers of New York over the past thirty years personally. He caught the amusement in Stefan Gillespie’s eyes, and laughed himself, enjoying his own pomposity and yet happy enough to puncture it.

‘It’s my city. It belongs to me. Every New Yorker feels like that.’

Over dinner the talk turned to families. Here Dominic Carroll seemed more reticent. He had sons, grown-up sons, but no grandchildren yet. He didn’t say much about his sons, for a man of such far-ranging enthusiasms, but it was enough to tell Stefan that the American wasn’t as close to them as he wished. Somewhere in there was a failure he didn’t want to talk about.

He let Stefan talk more now, and clearly he could listen too when he wanted to, or when the topic of conversation wasn’t so easy. Details of Stefan’s life on the farm at Kilranelagh absorbed him and amused him, but it was when he told him about Maeve that something changed. Stefan retold the story of his wife’s death, six years ago, in the matter-of-fact way he always did. It was simply part of who he was. The American listened intently, then reached out his hands and clasped Stefan’s across the table. By now Stefan had had a bit to drink himself; his acquaintance was ahead of him. Carroll shook his head sadly, knowingly. He had found a bond between them. He was a sentimental man; sometimes sentiments shared were a kind of friendship for him.

‘My wife died when my eldest was thirteen. It wasn’t so unexpected. She’d been ill a long time, and however much money you’ve got, when they can’t do anything, it’s no use to you. You keep thinking you’ll find a doctor who knows the cure, if only you look enough and pay enough. But you can’t pay your way out of God’s decisions. You can’t pray your way out either.’

As he said the last words he crossed himself.

They walked back to their seats from the dining room with glasses of brandy, quieter than they’d come. Stefan had no desire to continue talking about the past; it was enough to say it. But the American wouldn’t let it go.

‘You’ve never remarried?’ he asked as they sat down.

‘No.’

‘You’re still a young man.’

‘I’m not avoiding it. It’s just something that hasn’t happened.’

‘You should count your blessings,’ said the American. It was an abrupt change of tone. Where his words had shown sympathy, consideration, shared understanding, there was a surprising edge now, something almost bitter. He looked away, staring at the window. It was dark outside now; all he was staring at was the black hole that was the night sky. ‘You should be careful. It was the biggest mistake of my life. If you want sex, you can buy it. You can buy as much as you want. But if you think you can replace the one love you ever had, if you think you can even come close, forget it.’

Stefan didn’t reply. The new tone of voice had unsettled him. It contained an appeal to an intimacy he didn’t want and didn’t feel he liked very much. Whatever the man was talking about it was his and his alone.

For a moment the American said nothing either. He seemed to realise that he had taken a direction he shouldn’t have done and had revealed more of himself than he was comfortable with. He looked up and smiled again. ‘That’s the trouble with a journey like this. Nothing to do but drink and they chuck it at you like there’s no tomorrow.’

Stefan nodded. ‘I’ve had enough. I wouldn’t mind some more coffee.’

Carroll called to the galley for two coffees. He turned back to Stefan.

‘You don’t make much sense to me. You mind me saying it?’

‘It depends what you mean,’ laughed Stefan.

‘I’ve got your boy, and why you’re where you are, looking after him, and I’ve got what happened to your wife. I’ve got the farm and your mam and your dad. But I haven’t got you. I haven’t got you at all, you know that? What are you doing sitting on your arse in a country police station, running in drunks and, what was it, raiding the village hall to see if there’s any illegal dancing going on! Jesus!’ He grinned, entertained by the idea. ‘That’s not you, Sergeant Gillespie, not you! I didn’t have to talk long to see that.’

‘Someone’s got to do it,’ shrugged Stefan, and attempted a smile.

The look of suspicion was back in Dominic Carroll’s eyes. It struck Stefan forcibly that although the stranger was smiling at him, he somehow didn’t believe he was who he said he was. They’d talked about all sorts of things. Yet there was a sense now, as he watched the older man watching him, that the American had been probing, trying to find out something when there was nothing to find out. Stefan needed a break from the conversation. He leant across to the newspapers Carroll had been reading and picked one up.

‘Do you mind if I have a look at one of these?’

‘Help yourself. I’m going to turn in. We’ll be landing at Botwood in the early hours. It’s best to get some sleep in. You can’t sleep through it.’

On each side of the compartment the seats had been made up into beds while they were at dinner, with curtains across them to create small bedrooms. Dominic Carroll got up and took an attaché case from a rack above. He pulled out a washbag and walked through the plane to the bathroom. Other people were starting to appear in pyjamas, dressing gowns.

Stefan felt relieved to be alone for a moment; if nothing else it was a rest from talking. He opened the newspaper. The first thing he saw was a report about an IRA bomb that had gone off in London the day before.

There had been dozens of bombs across Britain since the beginning of the year. On 12 January the IRA Army Council had sent a letter to the British government, declaring war and claiming it was now the sole representative of the people of Ireland, since the treacherous and toadying government the people of Ireland had voted for several times since 1922 did not have the legitimacy the IRA had inherited, by a process similar to Apostolic succession, from the seven signatories of the Declaration of Independence in 1916.

The quantity of bombs that had followed this declaration of war had been impressive, even if the results had been indifferent. The damage had been minimal; reaction in Britain, despite indignant speeches in Parliament, seemed more like puzzlement than either anger or fear. The targets were sometimes railway or underground stations, mainly in London, and bridges over canals elsewhere; sometimes electricity pylons and gas mains were attacked; sometimes incendiaries were planted, more randomly, in stores like Marks and Spencer, Burton’s, Woolworths; one bomb had gone off at the offices of the News Chronicle in Fleet Street.

Remarkably, no one had yet been killed, in line with the declared intention of the IRA’s chief of staff, Seán Russell. In this most recent attack two bombs had exploded by the Thames, on Hammersmith Bridge. Stefan had heard about it in Dublin.

Two explosions which occurred at Hammersmith Bridge, just after 1 a.m. yesterday morning, are being investigated by Scotland Yard officers. The force of the explosion dislodged two girders in the suspension work of the bridge, and one was thrown across the roadway. Lamp standards were demolished and the middle of the bridge was left in darkness. While investigations at the bridge were in progress, Divisional Detective Inspector Clarke left to interview two men at Putney police station. It was later decided to arrest the two men. They were Edward John Connell, 22, a salesman, of Elibank Gardens, Barnes, and William Brown, 22, of Grafton Place, Euston.

He looked up to see Dominic Carroll opening the curtains into his sleeping compartment, and looking down at him with a wry smile as he did so.

‘Another bomb.’

‘Another bomb,’ replied Stefan; it was familiar news after all.

‘They don’t seem to be able to do much to stop it.’

‘Well, they will if they keep arresting people at the rate they have been. I don’t know what it is now, fifteen, sixteen, and two more yesterday.’

‘You’re assuming the IRA’s short of volunteers then?’

‘There are only so many people who’d know how to plant a bomb.’

‘Well,’ shrugged Carroll, ‘the British must be shaken up by it now.’

‘I would be,’ Stefan nodded. ‘I’d be pretty pissed off if I lived in Barnes and I had to go all the way down to Putney to find a bridge. I wouldn’t put it much stronger than that. Unless London County Council’s very short on lamp standards, I wouldn’t say it’ll keep anybody awake.’

As this conversation had started there had been a look of amused satisfaction on the American’s face. Stefan believed he could read it easily enough. He had sat in pubs with enough American-Irish singers of Republican songs to know that though ‘Up the IRA’ was a cry that was hardly on many lips in Ireland, the enthusiasm in New York and Boston and Chicago was unaffected by the fact that the IRA wasn’t only at war with Britain, it was still ideologically at war with the government of Ireland itself. It wasn’t an argument he intended to start. Carroll could have his opinions.

‘You’re one of Ned Broy’s men all right, Mr Gillespie. Goodnight.’

The words were said with something like a grin, almost with a wink, but there was something colder in the words than anything that had gone before. They were words that no guard could fail to understand, and they came from somewhere that was about more than singing rebel songs.

To be one of Ned Broy’s men was to be more than just a lackey of the illegitimate entity that Republicans still referred to contemptuously as the Free State; it was to be an informer, a traitor, a killer. Wasn’t the Commissioner a turncoat, like de Valera and all his crew, an IRA man himself who had brought ex-IRA men into the Gardaí to hunt down their old comrades, to imprison them, to torture them, sometimes to kill them? And it was true enough. The men Ned Broy had brought into the Garda Special Branch had done all that. Their reasons didn’t make the bare facts any more palatable.

That none of this had anything to do with Stefan Gillespie didn’t mean he couldn’t feel the contempt behind Dominic Carroll’s parting wink, or that he didn’t sense now that the man was no idle wearing-of-the-green, up-the-rebels American-Irish tourist. He was a political Republican, and as a wealthy and influential man in New York he probably mattered in Republican politics, whether it was in America or Ireland, and it was likely both.

Stefan remembered that Carroll had expected him to know who he was. If he really was someone, it was unlikely he hadn’t had a Special Branch tail on him while he was in Ireland, or that he wouldn’t have been aware of it. The suspicion he had shown, on finding a Garda officer sitting opposite him on a plane to New York, with apparently no very good reason to be there, finally made sense.

It was 5.30 in the morning when the Yankee Clipper bumped down into the waters of Botwood, Newfoundland, and was tied up at the end of the long pier at the western end of the small harbour. Stefan Gillespie had not been able to sleep. For a while there had been the rattle of conversation and laughter and the clink of glasses from further down the cabin, where a group of passengers was playing canasta, but it had been silent for several hours now. The soft buzz of the engines, and the occasional grunt and snore from behind the curtains across the aisle, were the only sounds.

It was an odd feeling, cocooned up here, sailing through the night sky. He felt apart, not just from the world below in general, but from his own life in particular. He wasn’t in the habit of stepping back from himself, and he wasn’t entirely sure he liked doing it, but here, hanging in the darkness, it was hard not to do it. There was a lot in his head. Ned Broy and Owen Harris and Dessie MacMahon and Terry Gregory; Valerie Lessingham and Tom and his parents; the wide-ranging conversation with Dominic Carroll, about Ireland and New York and the prospect of war and Hammersmith Bridge and loss and grief and the sheep on the mountainside at Kilranelagh. And he kept coming back to the question a stranger had asked that he hadn’t asked himself in a very long time: what are you doing, sitting on your arse in a country police station, running in drunks?

When the flying boat was down he joined most of the other passengers, pulled on his overcoat, and left the cabin. Dominic Carroll didn’t stir, and he left him snoring quietly. He needed air and he wanted to walk. The air was cold enough. It was still dark. The Yankee Clipper was at one end of Botwood’s small harbour. Across the water he could see the lights of fishing boats coming into dock; there was only the chug of their engines and the sound of the wind, not strong but beating the rigging slowly, like a pulse.

Botwood was a village in the north of Newfoundland, almost as far east in North America as you could go. The whole of Canada lay to the west, but to the north the nearest piece of earth was Greenland, and to the east it was the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. The town sat in a sheltered bay, shaped by bare, treeless mountains, pretty much on the edge of nowhere; not very different from a thousand villages scattered along the western coast of Ireland on the other side of the Atlantic. Its buildings were of wood and corrugated iron sheets; most of its roads were dirt; an empty place in the great empty island of Newfoundland, which hadn’t even got round to calling itself part of Canada yet.

But Botwood had suddenly become important. By the time the flying boats of Pan American and Imperial Airways got there they were at the end of their range; they had to refuel. And the great and the good of Europe and America, the bankers and film stars, the heirs and heiresses and politicians, the makers and shakers, at least in their own eyes, now trailed regularly along the pier in the early hours of the morning, to drink coffee, eat a breakfast they didn’t need and talk about themselves.

Stefan drank the coffee too and spent some time talking idly with his fellow passengers. The conversation of the group, now all sitting together, had taken the turn every conversation did sooner or later, even at the edge of the world: war and the rumour of war. It wasn’t a conversation he wanted. He walked back to the sea along the dirt road from the pier and watched the fishermen unloading their catch. The lights of their boats marked one end of the harbour; the lights of the Yankee Clipper marked the other; the Atlantic water was very still in the darkness, full of the lights playing on its surface.

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