Betrayal (3 page)

The sergeant came back to give another salute and another crashing of his heels. Must he? cringed Mary.

‘Tobacco flakes as the lady has said, sir. Odometer reads 7,434 miles.'

Allanby watched as the softness of another smile grew to sharpen the windburn, and he realized then that it was at moments like this that the handsomeness passed into beauty.

‘Are you satisfied?' asked Mary, seeing a hardness she didn't like enter his gaze. Was he still offended that she'd no time for him socially? Of course he was.

‘Mr. O'Toole, have you any reason to detain Mrs. Fraser? If not, she's free to proceed.'

O'Toole closed and fastened the catches on her bags. As he handed them to her, his puffy eyelids lifted in feigned distress. ‘We'll be seeing you again, Mrs. Fraser. Say hello to the doctor, will you? Tell him October's best in the second week, with a passable in the third. I'm away to fish the Blackwater then myself. Sure and it would be grand if the two of us could …'

He left it unsaid in shyness perhaps, or in feeling out of place, and suddenly she felt a rush of warmth and sympathy for him and answered, ‘Thanks, I will. Everything all right about the motor?'

‘As right as rain, m'am. Now be off with you while I hold the troops at bay.'

She chucked the cases into the backseat but paused before getting into the car. Allanby watched her through the window of the custom's shed. He noted straightness, the defiance, the determination and wondered why she'd taken it upon herself to let him see her this way.

The rain came down the glass, blurring his image of her. A fine young woman—heady, the Irish would have said, as of a filly that needed to be trained for the course.

Corporal Donaldson raised the barrier and she drove on through without a second look or wave, knowing she'd be followed by their eyes. Until the car was out of sight, Allanby watched it. She'd stop some place down the road to dry her hair a bit and shake the water from her coat, would try to calm herself.

Unknown to him, Mary nipped into the bracken round a bend and had a pee. Then she stood out in the rain, gazing steadily back towards the frontier which could no longer be seen.

London's underground station at Charing Cross was a shambles. Blood-spattered bits of charred clothing seemed everywhere. One of the child's shoes was broken at the heel, the shoes no doubt second-hand and either purchased at a church jumble or picked up from one of the collections for those who'd lost their homes. A lisle stocking had caught on the shoe's buckle and had been dragged off—Churchill knew it had, the force of the explosion being such that the poor thing had been thrown some distance.

A button lay beneath the shoe—had it been from her overcoat? he wondered. She would only have had the one coat, such were the restrictions on what could and could not be taken by evacuees, so as to limit the amount of baggage to a single suitcase.

As he picked at the debris with the end of his walking stick, Winston Spencer Churchill let his moist blue eyes sift over the carnage. The fire had fortunately been quickly extinguished but even now pools of water still lay in the shallowest of hollows and the stench of wet, charred wood and wool and smouldering rubber stung the nostrils.

‘Prime Minister …'

‘Yes, yes, what is it?'

‘MI5's Listeners have reported renewed clandestine wireless transmission from Dublin.'

Unfortunately only snatches of an earlier message, sent on Sunday, had been intercepted. ‘Well, where is it?' he demanded.

Detective Inspector Franklin handed Mr. Churchill the thin brown envelope on which had been stamped, ULTRA, the Prime Minister ripping it open.

Silently those lips with their clenched cigar moved as the blessed thing was read:

0417 hours 9 September 1941 signal from VV-77 Dublin reads: Contact made. Heidi in motion.

Involuntarily Churchill closed a fist about the thing, crumpling it and the envelope before letting sentiment return. ‘Ireland,' he said, though Franklin could not know precisely what he was on about. ‘Dear old Ireland again. Find this IRA bomber for us, Inspector. Stop him before he gets across the Irish Sea, and if you cannot manage that, then get him afterwards.'

Again he returned to the damage, to a mass of splintered wood and the scattered possessions of a nation whose people had been forced to be constantly on the move.

Running from the Blitz was one thing; from the IRA another. Southern Ireland had steadfastly remained neutral. Britain had been denied naval and air bases it desperately needed, especially in the battle for the Atlantic. Always there had been talk of the Nazis opening a second front in the Republic; always he had tried to preach caution lest too swift and injudicious an intervention set the Irish aflame.

They'd never succeed in taming them, of course, but there were those in Whitehall and the War Office who would be only too willing to bomb the daylights out of Dublin.

Contact made. Heidi in motion
—what were they up to now? ‘Confound it, Inspector, must we stand like ruminants before the ashes of our haystack while they play elsewhere at fire? See to this, and see that the child's mother—I gather the father is abroad with our forces so she must bear the pain alone—see that she has both the best of comfort and support in her hour of need.'

With the recovery, on 7 May 1941, of codebooks from the trawler
München
and then on the ninth of that same month, the capture of U-110's Enigma machine and its codebooks, the decoders at Bletchley Park had been hard at work deciphering the wireless traffic of the German Navy. Not every attempt was successful. There were delays—changes in the Enigma settings. None of it was easy.

The codes of the Abwehr, the counterintelligence service of the German military, had also been broken, and sometimes Abwehr Hamburg's listening post would re-encode a message using an Enigma cipher machine before transmitting it to Berlin.

Perhaps a double dose of salts in this case. In any event, a tiny break that could well mean much. From an IRA bomb attack in Charing Cross Station to a second front in Southern Ireland was not impossible, given the nature of some of the Irish, but since the darkest days of 1940, de Valera, their prime minister, had taken the hint, never officially stated, and had all but wiped out the IRA in the South. It could be that the rebels wished a last-ditch attempt or that the Nazis wished to embarrass the British government and force the Americans into a firmer neutrality should dear old Ireland fall under the bombs of the RAF.

It could be the Nazis and the IRA had something planned for Northern Ireland whose air and naval bases in Londonderry and Belfast were crucial to the U-boat war.

It could be anything.

Striking a match, feeling security paramount and things hastily tucked into a pocket subject to loss, he held it to the Ultra signal and waited as it burned until thumb and forefinger could wait no longer. ‘They are insidious, Inspector. Insidious! Get them before it's too late!'

Get this Heidi for us.

It was on the 6.00 p.m. news. Mary heard it clearly from the foyer, a repeat notice. The bomb had gone off at 11.00 a.m. killing Nora Fergus and maiming thirteen others. Scotland Yard were asking members of the public to come forward of their own volition if they had any knowledge of this tragic event.

To attack the tube stations was horrid—the Blitz was still on; well, the bombing anyway. It had been terrible in May of this year, five hundred bombers in one night alone, waves of them. People used those stations during the raids. They slept in them, made tea, had singsongs to cheer themselves on.

‘Sure and it's a terrible thing, Mrs. Fraser. Now you mark my words, m'am, there'll be no good come of it. None at all.'

‘Now, Mrs. Haney, please don't get yourself upset.'

‘Upset is it, and me wrung dry already? I had to send Bridget home again today, I did. But you'll be taking some tea. Dublin to your satisfaction, was it?'

‘Yes. Yes, Dublin was fine.'

‘But there was a delay at the frontier?'

‘Yes. Yes, there was. This …'

‘This anarchist! Sadist! Hitler himself could be no worse.'

‘Mrs. Haney …'

‘I'll bring it, m'am. A good cup of tea will set you to rights, that and a change of clothing, I'm thinking. There was no news of this terrible trouble in Dublin, was there then?'

‘I … I didn't see the papers. I …'

Ria O'Shane O'Hoolihan Haney gave her the look she reserved for wanton harlots who sold their bodies in the streets of that fair city. She tossed her head knowingly and clucked, ‘Dentist, was it?' beneath her breath before departing to her kitchen.

By himself, Dr. Fraser was a saint, a prince of a man. With that young wife of his, the poor soul didn't know what to do, and that was the God's truth, it was.

Leaving her suitcases in the foyer, Mary found the will to climb the stairs. Exhausted by the border crossing, she dragged herself up to her room knowing Mrs. Haney would be listening for her, knowing too, that in all this Georgian loveliness—and it was lovely—the echoes sounded and the sounds of them ran straight to the kitchen.

‘How could I have forgotten those cigarette butts and the maps?' she asked herself. Had there been anything else? Dear God, she hoped there hadn't. Jimmy … Jimmy was on to her.

Dressed in a robe, she hurried along the corridor to the bathroom but in passing the head of the stairs, thought to call down to say she'd be taking a bath, but then thought better of it. For one thing, there was the boiler and its firing up—an hour at least—for another, there was Mrs. Haney.

Instead, she found a towel and went back along the corridor drying her hair and wishing the house was warm, not damp and cold. It wasn't that she didn't like Mrs. Haney or want at least to tolerate the woman, it was simply that given a measure of fairness and tact, they might well have got on, but that could never be. Not now.

Mrs. Haney didn't knock. The woman had the tray with the silver service and all, and very nearly dropped it.

‘Mrs. Fraser … Well, I never! I …'

No chance to cross herself, and speechless for once, but Mary could hear her saying to all and sundry, ‘As naked as a jackdaw plucked of its feathers, she was, and that's the God's truth, the brazen hussy!'

‘You can put it on the table over there by the window, Mrs. Haney. I was just trying to dry my hair at the electric fire.'

‘And the rest of you,' muttered the woman, clucking her tongue loudly enough for the sound to be heard in the kitchen.

‘Perhaps, then, the next time you'll knock?'

And her not covering herself at all, at all, swore Ria silently. Just standing there with the towel in hand, her backside to the electricity and that zebra-striped robe of hers down around her ankles, everything she owned just hanging out for all the world to see. Like fruit they was. Like young melons or overripe Bartlett pears! ‘I'll let the doctor know you're home when he comes in.'

‘You do that, and the next time I'm away and coming home, you make sure Bridget or yourself builds a fire in my room.'

‘Had you but telephoned, m'am, it would have been exactly as you wished.'

Lord save us but Mrs. Haney certainly knew how to put a person in her place! It was all about to start again. The house and Hamish, the lies, the village, its telephone line and electrical wires crisscrossing above a rain-swept single street, a track, a lane that ran between a straggle of tiny houses, too few of them Protestant so as to equal things out for all, the poverty of the place, the ignorance, the ingrown insularity, the castle and its prisoners of war.

The castle …

Erich Kramer … Erich who had been the captain of a German U-boat. Erich who had asked her to take a letter to his ‘cousin' in Dublin. Some cousin! She'd been tricked into helping him. Deceived!

For love? she asked and said, her back still to the electric fire, ‘You silly fool. Hamish is the one who loves you. Hamish would rather die than see you come to harm.'

Hamish didn't come home for supper nor did he ring to say what was keeping him. She ate alone in the smaller of the two dining rooms, the echo of lonely Crown Derby, Waterford crystal and Georgian silver being all around her, as was the flickering of a solitary candle.

At 9.00 p.m. he still hadn't returned or rung, nor at 10.00. At 11.00 she heard the pony trap, heard him softly chastising William, the stableboy, for having not gone home. At 11.45 she found him in the library but did not tell him she had come downstairs. Instead, Mary stood out in the corridor, the sight of him framed by the white trim of the doorway.

He was sitting by the fire, on the couch at the far end of the room, it being one of those sloppy, comfortable things with large, cushioned arms, a faded olive-green to beige cover and slips that hung loosely and were nearly always rumpled. Having been quickly gone through, a newspaper was strewn about as if impatiently thrown away, some of it on the floor, some on the inlaid fruitwood of the coffee table, the rest on the cushions.

The dog was asleep at his feet, and the white marble of the chimneypiece with its neoclassical columns and its crown of laurel leaves was beyond him. Was it Burke's
Landed Gentry
that he was now reading yet again, or the
Farmer's Almanac of 1937
, or
Chum
, one of his boyhood books? Hamish read widely and with such vigour and absorption, not even a vengeful, parsimonious librarian could stir him from it, and yes, he read voraciously when angry and upset.

The salmon and the trout rods, the basket creels and long-handled landing nets, boots, hats and tackle boxes were in there, too, in their usual jumble, along with the pith helmet from India and the spiked iron one of the German soldier he had had to shoot and kill in France, in that other war.

As always, too, he wore the same grey-flecked Harris tweed suit and waistcoat his rounds demanded, the same trousers with their stovepipe legs, the same blue tie with its multitude of tiny fleurs-de-lis in gold.