Red Herring (15 page)

It did, so on Sunday, the 15th of January 1939, in a communiqué to Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary, the IRA declared war on Great Britain.

The Army Council immediately set off a campaign in England, known as the S-Plan or the Sabotage Plan, which called for the destruction of power stations, transmitters, military installations and aerodromes on the British mainland.

The next day explosions went off in London and Liverpool. Bombs exploded under electricity pylons stretching across the Manchester Ship Canal. In London, gas mains were damaged. A fish porter cycling to work was killed by a flying manhole cover. Special Branch began rounding up the usual suspects. In the weeks following the initial explosions there were dozens of arrests. In
Manchester, two women were caught in possession of a barrel of potassium chlorate, two Mills bombs, forty-nine sticks of gelignite, and ten electric detonators — “the whole Sinn Fein conjurer’s kit”, in the words of the Irish writer and IRA Volunteer Brendan Behan, who was himself arrested, aged sixteen — and, most significant, a copy of the S-Plan. The IRA was unbowed. Two bombs exploded in the London Underground, one at Tottenham Court Road station and one at Leicester Square station. Police patrols around Whitehall were strongly reinforced and all ships arriving from Ireland were searched.

The campaign continued well into the summer. Two bombs exploded in the left-luggage department of Kings Cross railway station, resulting in the death of a bystander. In Liverpool, tear gas bombs went off in picture theatres, causing fifteen injuries. Incendiary bombs started fires in eight British hotels. Eleven bombs exploded in public lavatories throughout the Midlands. The advertising department of the
News Chronicle
in Fleet Street was the target of a bomb. London branches of the Midland Bank, Lloyds Bank and Westminster Bank suffered a series of explosions. Letter bombs exploded in twenty postboxes. One went off in a London sorting office and another in a Birmingham mail lorry. Every postbox in London was searched for further IRA devices. In short, there were bombings galore. The above list barely scrapes the surface. But in late August the campaign took a darker turn. A bomb exploded in the carrier basket of a bicycle leaning against a wall in the busy shopping district of Broadgate in Coventry. Five people were killed and more than fifty wounded. There was widespread revulsion at this outrage, and fury in Dublin. Death was not on the S-Plan. The fish porter hit by the manhole cover and the bystander at Kings Cross Station were accidents. The Coventry killings felt
deliberate. The bomb maker who leaned his armed bicycle against the wall and walked away whistling was Francis Xavier O’Phelan, aka Frank O’Flynn, and the Army Council wanted his head.

He was picked up a week later at the dogs in Limerick where he had gone to watch the grand final of the Irish Greyhound Derby, arm in arm with two harlots from Wicklow, the White sisters, oblivious to the danger he was in. As the boxes rose it was a streak of greased lightning called Marching Through Georgia who took the lead and held it to the finish by a distance of two lengths on good going, setting a track record of 30.05 with odds of 13–8.

Lining up at the tote to collect his winnings, O’Phelan felt the barrel of a revolver in the small of his back and was surprised to see that two IRA gunmen, Ginger Shaw and Roibaird Orland, had joined him in the queue. Shaw had spotted him earlier and sent Orland to fetch his lorry and some rope. The White sisters melted away.

The IRA men drove O’Phelan to a safe house in Bunratty owned by a Mrs Coogan, where his legs were tied and he was locked in a ground-floor room. A telephone in the hallway rang constantly and muffled voices came and went. The two gunmen guarded him in four-hour shifts. Shaw told him that an IRA hard man named John Fay, “a first-rate knee surgeon” in the brutal vernacular of Republican discipline, was driving down from Belfast for a session of rigorous interrogation.

Orland was of a gentler disposition. When he took over guard duty he and O’Phelan discussed Marching Through Georgia’s pedigree and then the broad strokes of the S-Plan. It became apparent to O’Phelan that the IRA planned to execute him for his role in the Coventry bombing. Orland offered O’Phelan a nip from his flask, had two or three himself, and soon dozed off.

O’Phelan undid the rope, gently lifted the revolver from the pocket of the sleeping gunman’s coat, climbed out the window and made his way to the Bunratty Garda station where he gave himself up.

The term “to grass”, meaning “to betray”, evolved from the rhyming slang for policeman: a “grasshopper” is a copper. Over the years the term has taken on a particularly Irish resonance. O’Phelan, feeling abandoned, threatened to grass like the grass in Phoenix Park, rolling green acres of names and details, the S-Plan stripped bare. In the backstabbery of Republican politics, such spillage suited no one, but O’Phelan was not without his champions in the upper reaches. They remembered how close he had got to the Earl of Galway the previous year, and at considerable personal risk.

An arrangement was made for him to be sprung from Mountjoy Gaol and shipped to Boston with a new name and one hundred pounds, part of the proceeds of a raid on the Amiens Road Post Office in Dublin, in return for a firm promise to keep his gob shut and never come back to Ireland. The deal was worked out by the former Officer Commanding, 2nd Tyrone Brigade, a shadowy figure named Peter O’Regan, who, in 1920, as a member of the Twelve Apostles, a squad set up by Michael Collins during the Irish War of Independence to assassinate the British agents known as the Cairo Gang, had known Fintan Patrick Walsh.

Ireland is a small place too.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“Walsh, that Freemanite, I knew it!” said Parker. He turned to Caitlin. “You see, Comrade? You misjudged Johnny. A principled beggar when you get right down to it, just like, whatchamacall, Sam Spade and them.” He picked up the sherry. “Wash those cups will you, sweetie?” he said to her. “This cries out for plonk.”

Molloy put his hand up. “Not for me,” he said. “I’m not staying. I came here to warn you, Caitlin. Walsh is a nasty piece of work. Ask Parker about him. You and Fintan are old cobbers, aren’t you, Vince?”

Parker waved away the suggestion. “I haven’t said boo to that splittist in twenty years,” he said. “But you’re right. He’s a hyena.” He pulled the cork from the flagon. “You won’t have a drop?”

Molloy shook his head, tipped his hat to Caitlin and left the flat. He was lighting a smoke when he heard someone running down the stairs.

“Molloy, wait!”

He turned. Caitlin crossed the footpath, putting on a cardigan at the same time, her purse getting tangled in one sleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I owe you an apology.”

“You don’t owe me anything.” He took his keys from his pocket. “Be careful, that’s all.” He looked up to the first-storey light. “And
don’t rely on Vince to look after you.” He shook his head. “How did you get tied up with that no-hoper?”

“Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you.”

He looked at her for a second. “Okay,” he said. “Hop in.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Molloy pressed the RSC buzzer and waited. Locks turned and the door cracked open. Bones squeezed out and looked up and down Francis Street. “All right, Johnny,” he said. He stopped when he saw Caitlin. For a moment he was speechless. This was a gross breach of protocol.

He leaned towards Molloy. “Hell’s bells, cobber. I’m not sure about this. We don’t have a sort of separate area for” — he jerked his head — “you know?”

“Miss O’Carolan’s a newspaperman, Bones,” said Molloy. “Unshockable. Caitlin, this is Bones Harrington, old friend of mine. Bones, Caitlin O’Carolan.”

“Mr Harrington,” said Caitlin, putting out her hand.

“Oh. Yeah. How d’you do?” said Bones, at a loss. Women weren’t his strong suit. He dropped his head and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “The boys aren’t going to be too happy, Johnny. Wouldn’t be surprised if this goes to the committee.” He stepped back, without enthusiasm.

Molloy held the blackout curtain to one side and Caitlin entered the bar. The conversation dropped and then stopped, and then slowly resumed. Molloy took her elbow and showed her to a table in the corner.

“I feel like one of the Scottsboro Boys,” she whispered, sitting down.

“What do those boys drink?” said Molloy.

“If I asked for a gin and tonic would it start a fight?”

“We’ll soon find out.”

“Don’t be long.”

“Yell out if there’s trouble.”

Tim was behind the bar. He gave Molloy a black look, his specialty. “Johnny,” he said, his voice accusing.

“Evening, Tim,” said Molloy. “Gin and tonic, and a whisky and water, thanks.”

“That’ll be singles? This late?”

“Doubles,” said Molloy. “But we’ll be quick.”

“Yes. Right-o.” Tim poured the drinks in silence.

“I called in to see your mum this arvo,” said Molloy.

“She said.”

“She seemed pretty good. You know. Considering.”

“She make you look through his old footie photos?” said Tim, still frosty, but warming slightly. “You would’ve been in half of them.”

“She did, yeah. She had pikelets. Still a good cook, your mum.”

“She’s a tough old boot, but hell’s bells,” said Tim. “Korea? What was he thinking?” He put a chunk of lemon in the gin. “Five bob, thanks, Johnny.”

Molloy paid and carried the drinks over to the table.

“Nostrovia,”
said Caitlin, taking a sip. She screwed up her face. She put her finger in the glass and stirred it a couple of times and took another sip. “I’m sorry for getting huffy this afternoon.” She reached into her purse for her cigarette case and offered him one.

“Didn’t bother me,” he said, taking a cigarette and lighting a match.

Caitlin leaned into the flame. She was spectacular in the smoky light.

“All right,” he said, putting the match in the ashtray. “How did you get tied up with Parker? Through the Party?”

She laughed. “You’re not a provocateur, are you?”

“I’m just curious,” he said. “Red girls tend to be, I dunno, more homely.”

“You chauvinist!” she said. “But thank you.” She spoke in a low voice. “I joined a Marxist-Leninist study group that met once a week in the Parnell Library. We passed a unanimous resolution to get together at eight o’clock every Monday night until the day of the Revolution. Our group had a cover name. The Succulent Propagation Society.” She smiled, tilted her head slightly, and blew a thin stream of smoke into the air. “The library didn’t know that what we were propagating was the extinction of the bourgeoisie. Vince gave us a talk once.” She shrugged. “He thought I showed promise.”

“I bet he did,” said Molloy. “Are you a Party member?”

“I believe in what the Party stands for,” she said. “I’m not a slave to it.”

“Things must have changed a bit. They didn’t allow the distinction in my day.”

“Why did you leave?”

Molloy tapped the ash off his smoke before answering. “Same reason you stop going to church, I suppose. You know? Contradictions?”

There was a pause. Caitlin sipped her gin and tonic. “What do you mean?” she said. “Contradictions?”

“Oh, hell,” said Molloy. “Was this the sort of thing that got batted around at the Succulent Propagation Society?”

She frowned. “It’s a serious question.”

Molloy knew he was sunk. “All right.” He spun his glass on the table a couple of times. “Everything I thought I knew about left
and right and right and wrong got turned upside down in Spain. Everything.”

“But that’s because you fell in with Trotskyites. Vince told me.”

“Come off it. They weren’t Trotskyites. They were those salt of the earth workers and peasants the Party talks about so much.
Compañeros.
They wouldn’t have known a Trotskyite from a Mickey Mouse-ite half of them. Or cared.” He made a small gesture, raising his left arm, fist angled towards his cheek, thumb facing out, the salute of the Left Opposition. “They knew the difference between
Don
and
Camarada
though.” He picked up his whisky and knocked it back. “And they were betrayed.”

“Betrayed?” said Caitlin.

“Yes, betrayed,” said Molloy. “By the Comintern. By the
Partido Comunista de España.
By Stalin. In the way the Non-Aggression Pact was a betrayal. I saw it happen.”

“No,
you
come off it,” said Caitlin. “The Non-Aggression Pact wasn’t a betrayal, as well you know. It was a temporary and pragmatic reaction to the impending abandonment of the Soviet Union by the West. If—”

“Finished with that, miss?” said Bones, pointing to Caitlin’s glass.

“No!” she said. “You’ll know I’m finished with it when it’s empty!”

“Right you are,” said Bones. He replaced the ashtray with a clean one and mumbled to Molloy, “Ask you to sorta knock back the arguing a bit, Johnny, all right, if you wouldn’t mind? We’re trying to keep politics to a minimum at the moment, what with one thing and another.”

“Good as gold, Bones.”

“We’re closing pretty soon, anyway,” said Bones. He wiped the table and walked away.

Molloy looked at Caitlin. “Look, it’s like Rachel Barrowman said. ‘When the fight against fascism finally came, the Soviet Union wasn’t part of it.’”

“Wasn’t part of it? Other than the God-knows-how-many Soviet citizens who died, you mean?”

She finished her drink, bringing the glass back down to the table with a loud bang. “Would you mind taking me to my car, please?” she said, standing. “This was a mistake.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Molloy’s car was parked in Francis Street. He went around to open the passenger door for Caitlin.

“I’m perfectly capable of opening my own door, thank you,” she said.

He drove out of Francis Street into Richmond Road and headed up Great North Road. Caitlin lit a cigarette and stared straight ahead. Smoke seemed to be coming out of her ears.

“So what is it exactly that you’re saying?” she said suddenly, glaring at him. “Are you saying that the Non-Aggression Pact was motivated—”