Betrayal (26 page)

The pony was getting restless.

‘Time? That's something only rich people have,' breathed Fay. ‘You'll meet with them tomorrow and you'll tell them you need something solid to send over on that wireless, otherwise Caithleen O'Neill will be hanging from a tree and you yourself will come to an untidy end.'

‘How can you talk like that to anyone?'

Nolan came back, saying they must be away. Mary had never heard him anxious before, but the Darcy woman gave no sign of wanting to leave.

‘Your gallant Captain Allanby is out there a-raiding, Mrs. Fraser, with the tracking dogs and all. You wouldn't have told him where to look for us, now would you?'

‘Dear God, I don't know where you've been hiding! How could I? I can't even see you now.' They were crazy, the two of them. Crazy!

Nolan crowded close. ‘Fay, we've got to go.'

‘Liam, shut yours. Allanby won't think to come here. It's too good a place. Dublin, Mrs. Fraser. On Sunday it is, with a message for them fellows in Berlin.'

‘The colonel will refuse to let me take Caithleen. I … I haven't got any other excuse. Not now. It's … it's a dead giveaway if I try to go there by myself.'

‘Liam?'

‘Fay, you know what Allanby's like. The horses …'

So they'd come on horseback. That must mean they had left them down the road a piece in a copse perhaps, or at the very back of the garden, in under the apple trees. The garden … Had they heard her digging and decided not to say a thing of it? Had they? ‘I'll tell the colonel that Franz Bauer was the one who hanged the Second Lieutenant Bachmann.'

Back to hangings was it? Leaving the car, Fay closed the gap between them.

‘Bauer … Franz Bauer was involved, this much I do know, but … but if I tell the colonel, Bauer will try to kill me. I'm sure of it, in … in spite of their wanting Erich to escape.'

‘Liam, take hold of the slut.'

‘Fay …'

‘Do it, damn you!'

Mary knew she'd choke as the nightgown was lifted, that she'd scream for help if she could and try to get away, but would be beaten down.

Fay's hands were cold but the muzzle of Nolan's pistol was being pressed behind her right ear, the woman breathing into her face as her nipples were pinched and held.

‘You'll give the colonel that booger's name, you will, do you hear? Him that wants shall receive but only after the giving of his promise to let you take Caithleen on Sunday.'

‘Fay …'

‘Liam, there's a small matter we must discuss with this collaborator of the Germans. That of the six sticks of gelignite that went missing.'

Her breasts were still being held but no answer was forthcoming. ‘There were eighteen, Mrs. Fraser, and you took six of them. Now tell us why?'

‘I didn't. Allanby said there were twelve. He … he must have wanted to downgrade the size of the bomb. Now get your filthy hands off me.'

‘Filthy, are they?'

‘Fay, leave her be. We haven't time for this.'

‘A pity. Well, later then. So it's a meeting tomorrow, it is, a giving of a name, and then off to Dublin's fair city with you on Sunday.'

Nolan pressed two cartridges into her hand and said, ‘Those are for good behaviour.'

Things had been speeded up.

Dropping the nightgown on the floor beside her bed, Mary tried to rub away the feel of Fay Darcy's hands but it was no use. She wished Erich hadn't lied to her, wished she'd never been unfaithful to Hamish, wished she had her wedding ring, wished so many things.

Nolan and Fay Darcy might well come to think she must have buried the dynamite in the garden. They would let her believe it safe, then would shove the evidence in her face, and that … why that would bring its punishment.

Wishing was, of course, of no earthly use, and she couldn't go out there now to see if they'd taken it. The truth was, she'd never know with them, but then that was also true of Trant and the others.

She could hear the colonel saying, ‘Bauer … Oh yes, we rather thought he might have been involved. He's not the only one who put the noose around that chappie's neck, Mrs. Fraser. Oh my, no. There'd have been others. The Nazis never do a thing like that without a proper tribunal. At least three, I should say, perhaps even four or five. Find out for us. There's a good girl, hmm?'

‘Caithleen …' she'd say.

‘A bit of a bother, is she?'

‘Colonel, the IRA might try to take her from the house.'

‘Perhaps we'd best leave her there, then, Major?'

Trant would allow a brief, effacing little smile, and would say, ‘We've been having the house watched round the clock for just such a thing.'

She'd have to beg. ‘Please let me take her to Dublin on Sunday. It isn't fair. I've done what you wanted. Well, some of it anyway.'

The colonel would have none of it. ‘Mrs. Fraser will have to go before the courts with this Bauer thing, eh, Major? It would be best then to have the names of all of them.'

Hans Schleiger and Erich Kramer—she knew that's what they would want her to say but was it true? If Bauer was one of them, and ‘Franz' such a good man in a pinch, then hadn't he been acting under orders and wasn't that why Helmut Wolfganger had said, ‘It's a good thing they hanged Bachmann when they did'?

‘Mary … Mary, what is it?'

‘Nothing! I … I couldn't sleep.'

She was caught in the passing moonlight of drifting clouds, was over by the windows, naked and so very lovely it hurt to look at her.

‘Hamish, please leave. I … I just need to be alone.'

‘Lass, for God's sake let me help.
Och
, I know you're in love with Erich. I canna fault you for that, but is there something else?'

They'd kill him if she said anything, and when he took hold of her, she pressed her forehead against him.

‘I love you, lass. I always will.'

She mustn't cry. ‘I wish I hadn't lost my wedding ring, Hamish. It did mean something very special.'

In words that were so hard to find she told him of the child she had had to leave behind in Canada—she owed him that much at least—and he told her he'd always known she had had a child but hadn't felt it his place to ask though had seen how terribly upset she'd been with herself and still was. ‘The tears caught at an introspective moment when you'd be alone and looking out into the garden, Mary, the times I'd see you longingly linger over the dolls and toys in some shop.
Och
, if there'd been something I could have done to bring Louise back to you, I would have. I know you ache for her, but it's us we have to settle. Erich will be sent to Canada soon. He'll be out of our lives and wasn't meant for you in any case.'

They'd kill him. ‘Get out. Get out of my room.'

‘Mary, he doesn't care two pins for you.'

‘Hamish, I know that. Now please go.'

‘And have the house turned into a prison?'

‘Yes. Yes, that's it exactly!'

¹
Rock candy.

²
The short sword.

³
Extra rations of sugar were made available at preserving time, though Mrs. Haney could have used honey from her own hives.

7

Again at dawn the hills were wrapped in mist, and the green of them was like a dream, but then the sound of gunfire came. Three short bursts from a Thompson submachine gun, then a longer one, a whole clip that time, the singular flat reports of Lee Enfield rifles breaking through with the pop, popping of pistols and revolvers and then another long burst and more of the other.

Mary found she couldn't move. The patient gurgling of the Loughie beneath the bridge was as horrid laughter, but no more gunfire came and the silence went to a hush that hurt, she straining to listen.

The lolling toll of Parker O'Shane's lead milker returned, the cow tossing her head for some reason. Distant beyond the hills came the faraway honking of migrating geese, wanderers from the high Arctic: Brants or Canadas.

The gunfire had been over towards Parker's farm. Three short bursts and then a longer one. A confusion of singles with one final shot as if to finish things off.

Trembling, she shut her eyes, tried hard not to cry, hadn't slept, had come out here to watch the sun climb over the hills to burn off the mist or be drowned in the rain. It was Thursday, the day of her meeting with Erich's superior officers, yet the dawn had brought something other than the peace of mind she'd so desperately needed, and it had come swiftly, unexpectedly.

‘Mary, don't go near him.'

There was no memory of having ridden from the bridge to the farm, none whatsoever of dropping the bicycle in the road. No memory of the men, the sweat-lathered horses with their military saddles, the uniforms, the Sam Brown belts and guns, the guns.

Smoke from the turf fire in the thatched-roofed cottage trailed thinly into the air … ‘
Jimmy, let go of me!
'

The smell of him, that of his horse, of the hay, of cowpats, ragwort, Michaelmas daisies, rotting apples and hawthorn berries came to her. ‘Parker … Parker, what happened?'

Mary shook Allanby off, but the men stood round watching her, some out in the adjacent fields, some over by the paddock gate, a cluster by the stables, one standing near the manure pile with a pitchfork in hand. A pitchfork!

There was blood on the road—blood melding with the grey of scant limestone gravel and the black centuries of spilled peat. Parker … Parker lay across the hump in its middle, his left leg thrown out, the right one bent up and in towards the stomach. His face had been smashed to pieces; his hands were broken. The stomach had been ripped open, his intestines protruded.

‘Mary, he ran.'

Her voice when it came was shrill. ‘Why shouldn't he have? You
jumped
him! He had nothing to do with anything. He wasn't one of them. He was just a friend. Just someone I could talk to.'

Kneeling in the road, she reached out to take Parker by the shoulder, to try to awaken him. Turning, she angrily looked up and Allanby heard her saying, ‘What happened, Jimmy? Did you panic? Is that why the army sent you to Tralane?'

There was only hatred in her, no thought of compromise. ‘Sergeant Stewart, see that Mrs. Fraser is shown the others, then take her to the cowshed and stable.'

Jimmy had been wounded and was holding his left shoulder. ‘You broke under fire. You shouted at your men and they opened up on a poor old defenceless man.'

‘Sergeant, I gave you an order. See to it.'

They took her out into the pasture and she saw the Lee Enfield rifle that had been pitched aside as the man had fallen.

‘Thomas O'Grady, m'am.'

Mary had never seen him before. He was just a life expending its last moments twitching in the grass. ‘Can't you help him?'

He wasn't old, wasn't young: a man with a parched throat, stubble on his sunken cheeks and wearing a black frieze stovepipe suit that had seen poteen and cigarette ashes and egg or colcannon and porter dribbled and spilled with lashings of pork dripping and all other such things including jam roll-up and milk too, for he must have been a farmer at one time.

They left that body and went over to another.

‘Janet Duffy. Age twenty-two years, seven months and four days.'

This one was lying by the hedgerow that ran alongside the road. The girl's ash-blonde hair moved gently in the wind. She was on her back, and the whole of her blue pullover where the grey tweed jacket lay open, was soaked with blood.

There was a revolver lying not far from her left hand, and Mary had the thought then that the girl had been the last of them and that Jimmy hadn't felt she'd try to shoot him, that she'd been trapped against the furze and had lifted the gun after all.

It was mad; it was insane.

‘A student, m'am, of divinity at the university in Dublin.'

There were still two bodies to come. Had Fay Darcy and Liam Nolan been caught? If they hadn't, she was in for it …

They were lying on the other side of the cottage, one of them in the chicken run, the other over by the cowshed. Two brothers—the red hair was the same, the freckles, too, the build, the height, the chubbiness, even the way they had clutched their rifles to the last and hadn't let go of them.

Questions would be of no use with them, torture neither, but then she was taken to the cowshed to see the reason why Jimmy had wanted her to view the others first. It wasn't Kevin O'Bannion but a haunting similarity was there in fast-fading eyes that squinted up into the half-light. The short, crinkly black hair was the same as were the facial clefts, which now drew in as a spasm came.

He'd been shot in the groin, was sitting slumped against a post, mired in cow shit. A Thompson submachine gun, obviously a gun of many killings, leaned against the far wall, having been picked up by one of Jimmy's men. Spent cartridge casings lay about.

‘Brian Doherty,' said Sergeant Stewart. ‘A cousin of Kevin O'Bannion's and one of the ringleaders of the Belfast organization.'

‘Go fuck yourself, you tommy bastard.' Doherty winced but when the spasm passed, he swept stern grey, searching eyes over her just as his cousin would have done.

It was Stewart who, nudging Doherty's left boot with his own, snorted and said, ‘You'll not be playing stud to the girls anymore, Brian. Tough luck.'

‘Give me a gun and let me kill myself!'

His scream was shattering. Sunlight played on the hand that clutched the bloodied crotch.

‘In the name of Jesus, have some compassion,' he cried. ‘The pain's fair killing me.'

‘Then suffer.'

Stewart turned away but Mary remained, for Doherty was begging her now yet could so easily have watched another die if the situation had been reversed. ‘Let him die as he wants,' she heard herself say.

But that, of course, would not have done, and she was taken from the stables. Jimmy had had his shoulder bandaged. Four cases of dynamite had been dug out of the manure along with some sacks of fuse and things that had been wrapped in oilcloth. Fay Darcy and Liam Nolan had got clean away—that was all there was to it and she had best get used to it, but had they gone from the house last night to Parker's farm or had it been the other way around and had that been why Nolan had been so anxious, the rest of them waiting here for him and Fay to return? Certainly at some point, Fay and Liam had noticed that they weren't alone. Somehow they had slipped away because there was no sign of them and no one here was saying anything of them.

They would have muffled the hooves of their horses and muzzled them, would have led each one across the fields and back through Jimmy's line of men because that was the way Liam Nolan was.

He'd have let the others take the rap. Fay would have wanted to warn them at least, but in the end Fay would have had to tag along.

Of the five cases of dynamite that had been stolen from that quarry, one remained. There'd be fuse and caps enough and electrical wire, too, and the blasting machine.

As on the road at dawn, Mary had no memory of riding home, of putting the bike away, or even of going into the house to numbly tell them what had happened. Hamish had rushed off in anger at the stupidity of mankind but by then an hour or two had elapsed since Brian Doherty had been wounded. There would be no hope of saving him, the delay deliberate—a plan to crush the IRA in the North as well and drive the whole lot of them into the grave or the sea, but would Nolan and Kevin O'Bannion be forced to flee the country as the Earls of Tyronne and Tyrconnel had done, though in a German submarine?

Mrs. Haney, who hadn't had two good words for her half-brother, had keened like a wild banshee at the news. She and Bridget and William had rushed off home to attend to their grief and the grieving. Caithleen and herself had been left alone in the house, the girl not speaking, just sitting in her room as Parker's words kept coming back, ‘Ah, and sure, isn't death an Irish pastime?'

Six lives in an instant and tears that came of their own in sudden rushes. Think, said Mary to herself. You must.

Out at the back of the garden, some of the windfalls had been crushed beneath the horses' hooves. Following their trail, she went after them, a hoofprint here, another there, a broken stem of grass. More by luck than skill she found the place where Jimmy and some of his men had waited. One of them had urinated close in and high up against the trunk of a tree so as to make no sound. Because of the shade and the damp, the stain had not yet dried.

They'd have been nervous, jittery—afraid for themselves, would have known that Fay Darcy and Liam Nolan had come to the house but for what reason?

To see her, of course.

There could now be no longer any doubt of it. Trant and Jimmy and the colonel must know the IRA had been blackmailing her, but did they know for certain that she'd been helping Erich to escape?

Caithleen was still in her room with the door closed and locked. Mary knew she ought to tell her she'd get her safely away before it was too late, but knew the girl would only turn her back on her and say nothing.

Putting on her gumboots, she went out to the stables to stand before the piles of manure that were heaped against the barn-board fence in the yard. Nolan and Fay Darcy wouldn't have had time to hide the rest of the dynamite here. They wouldn't have dared. Even so, she had to be certain. Taking up the pitchfork, she went to work—the fresh, of course, but then the not-so-fresh and well rotted. If anyone should come along, she'd have to tell them: Throwing the one into the other. Turning the bloody stuff over because … why because she'd had to do something, couldn't have stood or sat still a moment longer, was having enough trouble just stopping the tears. Parker had been her friend,
her friend
!

There was, of course, no sign of the dynamite. Nolan and the Darcy woman really wouldn't have had the time, yet they'd been in the stable.

Setting the pitchfork down, Mary glanced into the yard and along the drive, cleaned off her boots and, crossing to the loft ladder, removed them just in case.

The wooden powder box, looking not unlike a butter box, was under the hay at the very back against the wall. Its lid had been opened and then nailed loosely, and when pried off, there was a hollow in the regimented rows of waxed, stiff, brown paper-covered cartridge sticks, each of one inch in diameter and eight in length.

A label had been stencilled on the lid:
GELIGNITE. NOBEL NUMBER ONE, 50 LBS, 110, 40%.
One hundred and ten sticks, less the eighteen, all with 40 percent active ingredient, i.e., nitroglycerine, the words
dynamite
and
gelignite
often being used interchangeably, though there were differences.

There were blasting caps enough and fuses and coils of thin electrical wire and the plunger thing, all in three canvas sacks. Nolan was a bloody fool! The dogs, those tracking dogs …

Taking four sticks out, she gingerly brought them up to her nose, the smell rocketing sharply to her head as before, making her instantly dizzy and sick and lightheaded all at once, a smell like no other: aromatically clinging, heavily cloying and of ammonia yet still so hard to define. Not quite of bitter almonds but very much of them. Not sweet, but then of a sweetness.

Her head began to fiercely ache. The stiff paper covering wasn't sticky, so none of the nitroglycerine could have leaked through, but Nolan mustn't find out that she had discovered them. Putting the sticks back, she carefully refitted the lid, but couldn't remember exactly how it had been and had to hunt for the nail holes.

The lid had been banged on, then, with the heel of a hand—the nails had been loose. Yes, yes, that's how it had been. But she couldn't do that, not with her hand.

Finding a bit of wood, she wrapped it in a sleeve and gently tapped the nails back in so that the lid was still loose and could easily be pried off.

One thing seemed all but certain. Since Fay Darcy and Nolan had been busy up here, they might not know she had buried those six sticks in the garden, yet she hadn't heard them when she'd first come to get the spade, only when she'd brought it back, a worry.

‘Fay would have had to keep watch while Nolan hid things here,' she muttered to herself. They'd been on the run from Parker's, with Jimmy probably close on their tail, but if Fay had seen her up to something, was she now planning to ask her about it later?

Knowing that she shouldn't, that they might well have counted the blasting caps but that there could be more than they'd ever need, Mary crawled over to the sacks.

The blasting caps were of two types just as Parker had said—pencil-thick cylinders an inch and a half long and of either aluminium or of copper. The type for the black-powder fuse was of aluminium and had a hole in one end into which the fuse was inserted. A row of tiny dents encircled the metal where the crimper was to be squeezed to bend the metal in and hold the fuse securely.

The copper fuses had two brown-covered electrical wires protruding from one end. The wires for each cap were looped over several times and secured with tape. Delays were of thirty ms, whatever that meant. It was dangerous to handle them, or so the labelling on the packets stated, but how many would she need and would they be missed?