Long Time Coming (13 page)

‘Time’s nearly up,’ said Grogan.

‘What’s it to be, Mr Quilligan?’

Quilligan sighed heavily. ‘Take your document to my brother Ardal. He’s a solicitor in Dublin. He has an office in Parnell Square. If I hear from him that it’s legally watertight, I’ll sign myself out of here and go to London with you. Is that good enough for you?’

It was more than good enough for Swan. He left the camp heartily relieved that he had done what was required of him and, with any luck, would never have to return there. The three-mile walk into the nearest town provided him with a badly needed breath of fresh air. Even a long wait at the station for a train to Dublin, and the agonizing slowness of the train when it eventually arrived, did not dent his spirits. All he had to do now was have Ardal Quilligan vet the document drawn up by Cardale’s solicitor, which he was confident would bear any amount of scrutiny, then sit back and wait for Desmond Quilligan to arrange his release.

So far, Swan’s journey to Ireland had been arduous and disagreeable. The so-called express from Euston to Holyhead had taken thirteen hours, most of them at night, with the windows blacked out. The ferry to Dun Laoghaire had been appallingly overcrowded even before seasickness had added its horrors to the voyage. And visiting the Curragh was an experience he would gladly have spared himself. But happier days lay ahead. He had booked himself into the Shelbourne, Dublin’s finest hotel, and was looking forward to living without the blackout, food rationing and the nerve-nibbling threat of aerial bombardment as a prelude to full-scale invasion. The longer it took the authorities to acknowledge Quilligan’s renunciation of the armed struggle and set him free, the longer Swan could enjoy the material advantages of neutrality – at Cardale’s expense.

The train reached Kingsbridge station in Dublin late that muggy afternoon. Swan knew better than to hope for a taxi. There was petrol rationing in Ireland as in England. The buses were as jam-packed as their London equivalents. He was minded to walk to the
Shelbourne, with a soothing bath and a fine dinner in prospect to reward him for the effort.

But his walk never took him further than the station exit, where a pair of burly, brown-suited men with narrow gazes and unyielding expressions closed in on him. One flourished a warrant card.

‘Eldritch Swan?’

‘Yes. What—’

‘Garda Síochána Special Branch. We’d like you to come with us, please.’

‘What the devil for?’

‘Because you’re under arrest, Mr Swan,’ the other man growled. ‘And if you want to reach the Castle with your skull intact, I suggest you quit blustering and do exactly what we say. There’s a car waiting. Let’s go, shall we?’

Thus was it fated that Eldritch Swan should spend his first night on Irish soil not between the crisply pressed linen sheets of the Shelbourne Hotel but in the dingy confines of Dublin Castle. He had told Quilligan he knew nothing of Irish politics, but he knew enough of Irish history to be well aware that his destination had been the bastion of British colonial rule until 1922. The police car that sped him along the Liffey quays and in through an arched gateway to the Castle’s lower courtyard was taking him to a place riddled with bad memories and old grudges. It was odds on that one or other of the policemen he met there would relish the chance to give an arrogant Brit a taste of his own medicine. Standing on his rights, whatever they were in Irish law, was therefore unwise. He had been an unwilling visitor to police stations before, but such experiences, he suspected, would aid him little in the minefield of national sensibilities he was now entering.

Two uniformed constables marched him into a flagstoned basement room, furnished with a table and three chairs. He was deposited in one of them. The constables’ glowering expressions deterred him from saying a word. The two Special Branch officers entered the room a few minutes later at a conspicuous saunter, smoking cigarettes. The shorter of the two pulled the vacant chairs
into position on the opposite side of the table from Swan and sat down.

He was a lumpy-faced fellow with small eyes, yellow buck-teeth and a crooked grin. His colleague, a smarter dressed, handsomer man altogether, chisel-jawed and unsmiling, leant on the back of the other chair and looked levelly at Swan.

‘Empty your pockets,’ he said, with calm insistence.

Swan obeyed. Pen, handkerchief, cigarette case, wallet, passport and the envelope containing Cardale’s document ended up on the table in front of him.

‘I’m Inspector Moynihan, Mr Swan; Special Branch. This is Sergeant MacSweeney.’

‘Grand evening for a chat, Mr Swan,’ said MacSweeney, whose grin threatened to become a permanent feature.

‘Can I ask what this is about?’ Swan ventured.

Pointedly ignoring the question, Moynihan picked up his passport and flicked through its pages, pausing at the one bearing the most recent stamps. ‘I see you entered the United Kingdom on the first of May. Where had you travelled from?’

‘Antwerp.’

‘I mean where did your journey begin?’

‘Antwerp.’

‘Sure about that, sir?’ put in MacSweeney.

‘Yes.’

‘It wouldn’t have been Germany, then?’

‘No, it wouldn’t.’

‘Do you know who Sean Russell is, Mr Swan?’ Moynihan asked.

‘No.’ MacSweeney sniggered at that.

‘Chief of Staff of the IRA. Currently to be found comfortably accommodated in Berlin, discussing who knows what with the Führer. Something endangering this country’s neutral status, perhaps. Coincidentally, he entered Germany just around the time you left … Antwerp.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ said Swan, reminding himself not to raise his voice. ‘I know nothing about the IRA.’

‘But you’ve just been to visit one of their trusted foot soldiers in
the Curragh: Desmond Quilligan. We picked him up after the Magazine Fort raid last December. A ruthless man. A stick-at-nought character if ever I met one. What did you want with him?’

‘Quilligan fathered a son while he was in England a few years ago. The mother died in childbirth. Her father secured custody of the boy and took out an order banning Quilligan from contact with him. Recently, the old man’s softened his attitude. He sent me here to persuade Quilligan to leave the IRA, come back with me to London and help raise his son.’

‘Do you seriously expect us to believe that?’

‘It’s the truth.’ Swan opened the envelope and held out the document for them to see. ‘Look.’

Moynihan craned forward and looked. He read for a moment, then nodded. ‘What do you think, MacSweeney?’

‘I think it’s the biggest load of shite I ever heard, sir.’

‘I’m inclined to agree. You can put your document away, Mr Swan.’

‘But—’

Moynihan cut him off with a slap of his palm on the table top. ‘Let’s be clear. We want to know why you went to see Quilligan, what you were doing before you left Antwerp, whose orders you’re following and what those orders require you to do next. We don’t want fairy tales about love children in London and doting grandfathers with hearts melting like butter left in the sun. Do you understand?’

‘I’m telling you the truth.’

‘We’re not stupid, Mr Swan. It’d be a grievous mistake on your part to think we are.’

‘I’m a British citizen. I demand you notify the embassy of my detention and the charge I’m being held on.’

Moynihan sighed and sat down. He gazed almost pityingly across at Swan. ‘Your government doesn’t have an embassy here, merely a humble legation. Pretending you don’t know that is a nice touch, I must say. As for charges, under the Emergency Powers Act we can hold you indefinitely without charge. Indefinitely means as long as we like: as long as it takes for you to start telling us what we
need to know. So, why delay? Why force us to resort to unpleasant methods of persuasion? You look like a reasonable man. Save yourself a lot of trouble. Believe me, you’d do well to.’

‘This is outrageous.’

‘No. This is good advice. Give us what we want.’

‘I’ve told you everything.’

‘Not yet. But you will.’

‘That’s a promise,’ said MacSweeney.

When he woke and saw that it was light beyond the small, high, barred window of his cell, Swan felt faintly surprised he had slept so soundly. He should by rights have tossed and turned on the thin palliasse that was all he had been supplied with in the way of bedding. Certainly there was plenty for him to worry about. So far, no one had laid a hand on him, but Sergeant MacSweeney was clearly itching to try fists instead of mere threats of violence to extract the information they believed Swan possessed.

He would have revealed the true nature of Cardale’s interest in Quilligan if he had thought it would do him any good. But there was no persuading MacSweeney or his impassive superior, Inspector Moynihan, that he was anything other than some kind of intermediary between German military intelligence and the IRA. His interrogation had lasted many hours, though exactly how many he could not have said. Nor could he recall any details of the interrogation beyond a repetitious exchange of accusation and denial. He suspected the fact that he was British had won him a few reluctant favours, but his pleas for them to ask Cardale to corroborate his story had fallen on deaf ears. And he was far from confident that the warder at the Curragh who had sat in on his visit to Quilligan would support his account of their discussion. All in all, his situation was grim and likely to become grimmer yet. But beyond cursing his folly and misfortune, there did not seem to be anything he could do about it.

An exchange he had had with Moynihan at some late stage in his questioning lingered sourly in Swan’s memory. ‘Are you sure this act you quoted applies to foreigners, Inspector?’ he had asked.

‘Oh yes, Mr Swan, I’m sure,’ Moynihan has replied. ‘While the emergency lasts, by which I mean the war, we can do pretty much what we like. As we will, with you, tomorrow.’

Swan doubted the literal truth of that. At some point, they would realize he was not what they thought and let him go. The problem was how many teeth he had to lose in the process, how many ribs he had to have broken. They had let him sleep on the knowledge that his interrogation, when it resumed, would take a harsher turn. He looked at the red bite marks on his arms that suggested he had shared his bed with at least one flea and pondered the likelihood that he would leave Dublin Castle with much worse wounds to remember it by.

His watch having been taken from him, he had only the haziest idea of what time it was. Eventually, a constable delivered his breakfast: stale bread and stewed tea. Swan asked him the time and was rewarded with an unhelpful answer the constable appeared to consider the height of wit. ‘Don’t worry about it, sir. We’ll organize all your appointments for the day.’

Swan fell to wondering how Moynihan and MacSweeney would be breakfasting, while he sat on his bed, soaking the bread in the tea until it was soft enough to chew. Moynihan he imagined in some well-to-do house in the suburbs, adoring wife and rosy-cheeked children gathered round him at the table while he sipped fresh coffee, smoked a cigarette and checked the letters page in the
Irish Times
for expressions of dissident sentiment. MacSweeney, by contrast, he saw in a cramped tenement, forking down a fry-up prepared by a slattern to whom he might or might not be married.

At length, the witty constable returned with a colleague. They escorted Swan down the long, dimly lit corridor that led back to the room where he had been questioned the night before. He braced himself as best he could for the rigours of what lay ahead.

He was still doing so when they walked straight past the room and headed upstairs. Swan glimpsed sunlit cobbles in the courtyard beyond unbarred windows. They reached an office noisily full of other constables, where a uniformed sergeant presented him with a tray bearing his confiscated belongings and asked him to sign a receipt for them.

‘What’s going on?’ Swan belatedly asked.

‘You’re free to go, sir,’ the sergeant replied. ‘Have you got everything you came with?’

‘It looks like it.’

‘Then we needn’t detain you a moment longer.’

‘Where’s Moynihan? And MacSweeney?’

‘The comings and goings of Special Branch aren’t vouchsafed to the likes of me, sir. Do you want to leave a message for them?’

Swan made no reply as he loaded his pockets. The turn of events had left him lost for words.

‘I thought not,’ said the sergeant.

Swan walked out into the courtyard and sniffed the sweet morning air. Sheer incredulity allowed little room for relief. He was guided by an instinct to quit the Castle before they changed their minds about releasing him. Tie looped unfastened around his neck, shoelaces bunched in his hand, he headed for the gate he had been driven in through the previous afternoon.

As Swan strode across the yard, a man emerged from the deep shadow cast by the battlemented tower next to the Castle chapel and called out: ‘Hold up.’ Swan stopped and turned to look at him. He was short and dapperly dressed, with a distinctive cock-of-the-walk strut to him that stirred a memory.

The memory became disbelieving recognition when the man took off his hat to show his face – smooth-cheeked and rounded beneath slicked dark hair, a sardonic smile dancing around the lips.

‘Linley? Miles Linley?’

‘The very same.’ They advanced to meet each other. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘You’re a sight for sore eyes and no mistake,’ said Swan as they shook hands. ‘I can hardly believe it.’

‘Nor me. A real turn-up for the books, eh, Cygnet?’

Cygnet was a nickname Linley had conferred on Swan at Ardingly, where Swan had fagged for the debonair young man Miles Bosworth Linley already was at seventeen and seemed still to be eighteen years later. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Coming to your rescue. I’m with the British Legation. Anglo-Irish trade links are supposed to be my province, but when Special Branch contacted us this morning for info on a suspicious globe-trotting Brit who’d been out to the Curragh to visit one of the IRA hard men they have penned there, and his name happened to be the same as my uniquely monikered fag of times gone by, Eldritch Swan, I naturally took an interest. Luckily for you.’ Linley grinned. ‘Consider this an overdue reward for cleaning my rugger boots so assiduously all those years ago.’