The Blood Upon the Rose (44 page)

‘That's it exactly.’ Smythe put the gleaming photographs on his desk, gave him back the original letters, and picked up his pipe to relight it. Between puffs, he went on: ‘One thing I learned … as intelligence officer … nothing so small you can ignore it … all pieces of a jigsaw that comes together in time.’ When the pipe was fully lit he took it out of his mouth, glanced at it critically, and waved the match up and down vigorously to put it out. ‘By Jove, Dick, on days like this I begin to feel the tide is turning and we’ve got these swine on the run. Don't you know?’

‘Maybe.’ Davis picked up his notes and prepared to go. ‘We have good days and bad days.’

‘Course. But you’ve got this lad Brennan, and we’re going to make hay in Kilkenny. And there’s this German plot. I wouldn't be surprised if we’re seeing the last days of old Michael Collins, you know. Off to join the old pantheon of Irish heroes in the sky, what? High time, too.’

Davis paused as he shrugged on his coat. ‘What German plot?’

‘Oh, don't you know?’ Smythe's eyes twinkled, as if he had half expected this response. He puffed at his pipe tantalizingly. ‘No, probably you wouldn't. All hush-hush. Forget I spoke.’

‘But what … ?’

Smythe tapped the side of his nose. ‘No, sorry, old chap. Absolutely top secret, all under wraps. Shouldn’t have mentioned it. Just keep your eyes peeled over the next couple of weeks, and you may get a nice surprise. Big thing, I promise you. But don’t breathe a word.’

Davis was intrigued. He turned over in his mind whether he should stay, and try to press the man to explain himself. But he decided against it. He had got what he came for, and that was more than enough. Not only that, but Smythe still trusted him. That was something to store up for the future.

Still, he thought, as he walked briskly across the Castle yard, why a
German
plot?

There was a connection there somewhere. But a connection with what?

When Sean awoke, Catherine was standing at the basin washing herself. She had her back to him, and she was quite naked. She bent forward and scooped water out of the bowl to wash her face, and then her neck and behind her ears and under her arms. He wondered if she were soaping her breasts but he couldn’t see that. Her movements were very brisk as though she were in a hurry to be clean. It was so cold in the room. The fire had died down and her breath steamed. She must have goose pimples everywhere, he thought, how can she bear the cold? He tried to get up but he couldn't persuade himself to move; he was too warm in the bed and his erection was as hard as a rock. Then she lifted her leg to put her foot in the bowl and wash her leg and he knew it must be a dream because he had never seen her do anything like that. He had not even seen her wash before. But before he could wake up she turned round. Drops of water were running off her body like tears but her face was smiling. Her hair was damp around her face, her eyes shone with happiness, and she stretched out her dripping arms to embrace the man who stepped from the shadows behind Sean.

Sean could see nothing of this man in his dream except that he was fully clothed. His big male hand gripped her naked buttock and her face, which Sean could see over the man’s shoulder, laughed with pleasure.

He woke up then, sweating.

He did have an erection and he was lying on a hard bed under a grey blanket with a grimy stone ceiling eighteen inches above his head. There was an unpleasant stench in the room, and a snuffling grunt from the bunk below him which Sean recognized as being the sleeping sounds of O’Rourke. There was grey light in the small barred window to his right. It was the beginning of another day in Mountjoy Gaol.

Sean was sleeping fully clothed to keep warm. As he moved, the letter in his breast pocket crackled. She should’t have written to me, he thought, then I wouldn’t have had these dreams. He thought of tearing up the letter and stuffing the bits into the foetid chamberpot under O’Rourke's bunk, but he couldn’t do it. That was the trouble: it was a link with the outside, with the life that might have been.

She has every right to go to someone else, he thought. I had my chance - I had her, even, as much as any man could have - and I rejected her. If I had behaved differently I would have had a right to be jealous. For the last two days, since he had received the letter, he had relived in his mind everything that had happened between himself and Catherine. He had wanted to blame her but there had come a time, late last night, when he had realized that it was unjust. She would almost certainly have stayed by him, if he had wanted her to.

The trouble was that it was only now, when he knew he was going to die, that he could admit to himself how much he needed her.

He had realized he was going to die yesterday when Kee had charged him with the murder of Assistant Commissioner Radford. The Ulster detective had been quite cold, hard, correct, with the light of utter certainty in his eyes.

‘You have the right to stay silent if you choose,’ he had said. ‘But anything you do say will be taken down and used in evidence. The trial should take place next month.’

Kee had been quite calm, watching Sean intently to see what his reaction would be. Sean had been stunned.

‘How do you know that?’ he had said.

‘You admit it then?’

Kee had been sitting, while Sean stood to attention in front of him. The young detective, Foster, had been standing behind Kee, watching Sean. Sean had looked from one to the other of them, searching for words. Why not admit it? he thought. It was an act of war – I’m proud of what I’ve done. But he wanted to live, too.

So instead, he had said: ‘What evidence do you have?’

‘Forensic evidence. The bullets in your gun match exactly those taken from the body of Radford.’

‘I don’t believe you. That’s impossible to prove.’

‘We’ll see about that in court. Do you want a lawyer?’

‘I’m a soldier of the Irish Republic. I don't recognize British courts in Ireland.’

‘You’ll get a lawyer anyway. Even back-street murderers are entitled to a fair trial.’

‘It wasn't murder, it was an act of war! He had a gun, too.’

There had been a long, shattering silence. Kee and Foster had stared at him, and Sean began to realize what he had said.

Kee had asked, quite gently: ‘How did you know he had a gun, Sean?’

‘I read it in the newspapers.’

‘I see.’ No one in the room believed that. It had been a sort of relief to Sean that they now all accepted what had happened. He thought of the confessional, the relief that came after admitting sins, the welcome back to the fold of humanity.

‘Who was the other fellow with you?’

It was the wrong question. At that moment Sean might have admitted the killing if he had been asked directly, but he would not betray a colleague. There was no answer.

Kee sighed. ‘There’s just a couple of things that still puzzle me about this, Sean. How could you be sure you'd shoot the right man? It was a foggy night - you could have killed anyone. How could you be sure what he looked like, and which hotel he was staying in?’

Kee had not expected answers to these questions, and none had come. But he had planted them deliberately in Sean's mind, so that later, when he was back in his cell, he would think about them.

And then discuss them with O'Rourke.

Kee’s plan nearly failed. For most of the afternoon, Sean and O’Rourke debated whether it was really possible to prove that a particular bullet had come from a particular gun. Neither knew, but both doubted it. But the only way Sean would be able to challenge such evidence would be to accept a lawyer and recognize the existence of the court. That Sean refused to do. None of the martyrs of 1916 had done it: he could not do it now, when the Republic was even more in being than then. The British legal system would win, therefore, by default.

‘But since I did it anyway,’ Sean said, ‘I suppose it doesn’t make much difference.’

There had followed a long silence while he had considered how he would die. O’Rourke, sensing the direction of his thoughts, began to talk of the heroism of the earlier martyrs: of Thomas Clarke, who had sighed with relief when he knew he would not have to endure another long prison sentence; of the Pearse brothers; of MacDonagh, who had died ‘like a prince’; of James Connolly, white with pain from his smashed ankle, who had had to be sat up on his stretcher to be shot. All of them had faced the firing squad with pride. Sean would be hanged, like Robert Emmet in 1803.

Upstairs, Kee yawned, and drummed his fingers on the table with frustration. It was not until five thirty in the afternoon that he heard Sean say: ‘At least they’re puzzled about one thing.’

‘What’s that then?’

‘How I could recognize Radford and know what time he would go back to his hotel.’

‘How did you?’

Sean laughed. ‘One of his own bloody detectives, that’s what. He identified the fellow for us. He’ll do the same for Kee before long, I bet you.’

O’Rourke was delighted. ‘You mean we have our boys right in there among the peelers?’

‘We do that. Not that I like the fellow all that much, mind. He did the job for us, all the same.’ He paused, and then, to Kee’s intense frustration, added: ‘But you’d best keep quiet about that, Dan. It must be a dangerous business, and if the word got out they’d be setting up the devil’s own hunt for the boy.’

‘Surely,’ O'Rourke agreed. ‘Me lips are sealed. And if you don’t tell me his name, I couldn’t pick him out if they stuck pins in me, could I now?’

And with that, Kee had to be content.

Lieutenant Alan Wilson sat in the front seat of the Peerless armoured car and picked his teeth. It was a difficult operation, for the front seat was narrow and cramped, and the driving of Private Garside, beside him, was never of the smoothest, but it expressed his boredom and contempt for the situation in which he found himself.

He had joined the army two years ago, just in time to see a month's action in France before the armistice. Since then, army life, which he had hoped would give him opportunities for excitement and adventure, had deteriorated into an ever more dispiriting round of training, bull, and routine. He had hoped to be sent to Mesopotamia, where there was still action of the traditional sort, with the Imperial Army sorting out rebellions of colourful, factious tribesmen. He might have seen the Pyramids, made love to a belly dancer, driven his armoured car full tilt across the desert in pursuit of fleeing Arabs on camels. That would have been something to write home about, he thought. Instead, every morning at ten thirty, he drove half a mile along the North Circular Road to collect a dead cow.

Or sometimes a pig, he thought gloomily. Today it was three sheep. The job he had been given was the meat run. With a driver, Private Garside, and a gunner, Corporal MacNair, he had to drive to the Corporation Abattoir to pick up the day's meat ration. It was typical, he thought: the bloody Irish were so disaffected and incompetent that they couldn't even be trusted to deliver a load of mutton to the barracks without an armoured car to carry it.

It annoyed Lieutenant Wilson particularly because he was proud of the Tin Annie. His father had owned a garage, and had worked hard to put his son through a minor public school. Young Alan had always been fascinated by things mechanical, and had volunteered for the motorized armour division because of it. All the three vehicles under his command were serviced once a week, kept in faultless mechanical condition and spotlessly clean. Yet the back of this one, despite all his efforts, stank like a butcher's van. It humiliated him. And so, to show his disgust for the whole performance, he picked his teeth and yawned.

It was raining, and although the massive bonnet of the car was heavily armoured in steel plate, the driver and the Lieutenant sat with their heads open to the elements. There was a bullet-proof screen that they could pull down in front of them, but they normally drove with it lifted up to increase visibility. Both wore capes, and the rain pinged on their tin helmets noisily, adding to Lieutenant Wilson's misery and sense of humiliation. Not even an Irish gunman would be dim enough to attack a vehicle like this, he was sure, yet regulations insisted they take all necessary precautions.

Behind and above them was an armoured turret with a Browning machine gun in it. Young Corporal MacNair swivelled it enthusiastically from side to side, aiming at anyone who might look remotely suspicious. At the last road junction he had shocked the life out of a group of middle-aged men and women, who had found themselves staring down the barrel at five yards' range. They had scurried off down a side street, shaking their fists and shouting incomprehensibly.

And why not? the Lieutenant thought vindictively. It was their children who threw stones and horse dung at the car every day on patrol - it was people like them who had caused the army to be here in the first place, instead of lying on a beach in Egypt, or driving along the shores of the Red Sea. It was people like them who forced him to drive back to the barracks every day with animal carcasses in the flatbed part of the car behind the turret, where troops and equipment were usually carried. He had been tempted, more than once, to dress up the carcasses to look like dead Irishmen, and would have done it, too, if his CO had had more of a sense of humour.

They reached the abattoir, swung into the yard, and parked. Lieutenant Wilson climbed out of his seat and stretched, wrinkling his nose at the appalling stench, as he always did. Leaving the private and the corporal in the car, he tramped through the puddles towards the office, the rain streaming off his cape. The windows of the office were steamed up, but there was a welcome glow of light from a fire inside. He opened the door and went in.

The manager, Ryan, stood behind the desk with one of his assistants. Both looked as pale as their aprons and had smiles on their faces; rather stiff, cracked smiles, Wilson thought. But all the Irish were cracked; he had no desire to understand them. He fumbled with his hand under his cape to bring out the order.