The City of Strangers (35 page)

‘So what do we do?’

‘We can’t stay here. If someone came down – we need to get out on to the lake. We can’t let the boat come in to the jetty. Once we’re away from the shore we can light the lamp. They’ll see us. There’s a boat we can use –’

He walked away, heading to the lake and the boathouse.

‘Come on.’

Kate took Niamh’s hand and followed.

‘But who was in the car? I’m sure I heard another one too.’

‘We haven’t got time. It’s a kind of party. But it’s not our kind.’

The look Stefan shot Kate seemed to tell her, finally, that any more would not help at all, not now; in particular it would not help her sister.

Niamh sat on the edge of the jetty, staring out at the lake that was still her only hope. Kate carried a second oar from the boathouse. Stefan was inside, clearing a path for one of the rowing boats. As Kate put the second oar down beside the first it slipped from her hands and clattered loudly on the boards.

‘Shit,’ she exclaimed.

Niamh grinned. ‘You never were very good with boats.’

‘Thanks Niamh, you can do the rowing then!’

It was the first time Niamh had smiled since they had run from the house to the lake shore. Kate bent down and kissed her forehead. As she looked up she found herself looking straight at Aaron Phelan. For a moment she was surprised more than she was shocked or frightened. Stefan had said there were no police. But she knew Captain Phelan. She had met him at the Hampshire House. And as Niamh turned round, she knew him too; he wasn’t any policeman, he was her husband’s policeman. And he was holding a gun.

‘You’re a noisy bitch, Miss O’Donnell.’

Kate stood very still. Niamh got up and stood beside her.

‘I didn’t put two and two together,’ said Phelan. ‘I was just uneasy. Still checking to make sure there wasn’t some drunken hobo round the place. But there was something nagging at me. Sheets! Where the fuck would you find a man who’d break into a house and kip there, and go through the presses looking for sheets to put on the beds? Now it makes sense.’ He shook his head, laughing. ‘So what you going to do, girls, row to Canada?’

‘Does it really matter to you?’ said Kate quietly.

‘It matters to Mr Carroll, that’s the thing. I don’t know what he’ll want to do. I know what I’d do and there’s plenty of water out there to do it in. But Mr Carroll’s a lot nicer than me. I’m sure he’ll be happy to put you on a boat back to the Emerald Isle and your sister back where she can be looked after. But for the moment, he won’t want to be troubled. Since you like it here, you can wait till he’s finished his business. I’m sure we’ll be able to find something to tie you up with so. But it could be a long night.’

It was only now that Aaron Phelan sensed there was someone behind him, but he didn’t have time to find out who it was. The barrel of a Colt Police Positive hit the back of his head and he collapsed.

Stefan Gillespie had crept out from the back of the boathouse, into the trees, and had got behind Phelan. The gaze of fear the NYPD detective had seen on the face of the two women really was about fear, but it was the fear that he would turn round as Stefan inched his way towards him. It was a good job he didn’t. Stefan still remembered Jimmy Palmer; he knew Phelan would have fired.

Stefan bent and picked up Phelan’s gun. He threw it into the lake.

‘Let’s get the boat.’ His voice was quiet, but urgent now.

He went back into the boathouse. Kate and Niamh followed quickly.

‘Niamh, you push it out with me. Kate, see what you can find to smash the bottom of the dinghy and the other boat. There’s maybe a hammer on the workbench. Make sure they’re holed, that’s all. I don’t know how long we’re going to be sitting out there, but we don’t want anybody coming after us.’

Kate hurried over to the bench to get on with the job.

Stefan and Niamh pushed the small rowing boat. It wasn’t heavy. The shock of what had just happened, the idea that her husband was there, at the house, hadn’t yet found its way into Niamh Carroll’s head. The action in front of her was all she could see; what she had to do to get away was all she had room to think about.

The sound of breaking timber echoed through the boathouse as Kate took a hammer and chisel to the other two boats.

The rowing boat was moving now, grating over pebbles and cracked concrete, out towards the water lapping round the lakeside entrance to the boathouse. There was thick mud there and suddenly the keel wouldn’t shift. Stefan and Niamh pushed hard, their feet sinking into the mud.

Kate came out to join them. Still the boat wouldn’t move. Then abruptly it shot forward, sending the three of them sprawling into the water, laughing. They got up and shoved the boat again and it was floating. Stefan pulled the oars down from the jetty. He held the dinghy as Kate and her sister clambered in, wet and muddy but somehow excited, then he got in himself. He took the oars and pulled away, past the jetty now, out into the lake.

Kate looked back. Niamh looked determinedly at the dark water ahead. She took a deep breath; she felt free.

‘We’ll keep going until we can’t see the shore, then we’ll light the lamp.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Fifteen minutes. Just pray they’re coming.’

Kate did pray. Niamh didn’t. She knew they were coming.

By the time Captain Aaron Phelan came to the boat had already gone. He couldn’t see anything out on the lake. He thought there was a light, but it was a long way out now. There was some mist coming in and the cloud had thickened. What little light there had been had gone. It wasn’t going to be easy to explain it to Dominic Carroll. He’d had them there; he’d had a gun on them. And he’d been suckered. He’d been lazy. When he heard the noise of the oar, the last thing he expected to find was the two women he’d been scouring New York for. But when he did he hadn’t followed it through. He thought he was only dealing with Kate and Niamh. It wasn’t just lazy, it was sloppy. There had to be a man there. Why the hell hadn’t he realised that?

As he turned away from Lake Ontario he swept his torch across the path. He saw something glinting. He bent down. It was a Colt .38 Police Positive Special, short-barrelled. He assumed it had fallen from his hand when he had been hit from behind, but as he picked it up he knew it wasn’t his. It was exactly the same, but it wasn’t his. He shone the torch on to the barrel. There was a dark mark, and several hairs stuck to it. The gun might not be his, but the blood and the hair were. Whoever had come up behind him had dropped it, or it had fallen from a pocket.

It wasn’t an unusual gun of course, at least not if you were a policeman. But it was new, almost brand new. There was no reason why a gun like thousands of police guns should feel so familiar, yet somehow it did. It wasn’t an accident it was here. He already knew that it came from Police Headquarters in Centre Street.

The small boat bobbed gently about on the lake. Every few minutes Stefan Gillespie pulled on the oars two or three times to keep it where it was. The Canadian boat would be looking for the jetty at Loch Eske; they had to stay as close to it as possible. The mist was heavier now, and in the white silence that surrounded them they would lose any sense of where they were if they drifted out further into Lake Ontario. Kate was in the bow, gazing out at nothing, holding the lamp in front of her. Niamh seemed to be looking out too, but as so often she had retreated inside herself. They said nothing; their voices would carry back to the shore across the water. The minutes passed slowly, until almost half an hour had gone; it seemed much longer.

Then there was a sound.

At first Stefan and Kate could barely distinguish it from the sounds inside their heads; it was so quiet they seemed to hear the beating of their hearts. But the noise was real and it was growing louder. There was light moving through the mist. Kate stood up and held the lantern. They were all shouting, Niamh as well. And then the light was coming towards them, cutting through the haze. They could see a white hull and the shape of a wooden wheelhouse. The engine cut quite suddenly and the boat swung round in front of them. A searchlight beam picked them out, momentarily blinding them. And a man shouted: ‘Bonsoir, mes amis, ça va?’

The Elco Cruisette was somebody’s pride and joy; inside it was all polished mahogany and brass. If the
Temeraire
had ever carried liquor across the lake during Prohibition, it lived a quieter life now. The two crewmen said little, and when they did say anything there was no reference to what was happening; they might have all been on a tourists’ midnight cruise. The men’s accents mixed Canada and France; when they spoke to each other they spoke in French. They took Stefan, Kate and Niamh down to the saloon and left them there with a bottle of rum. But the closed-in cabin wasn’t where any of them wanted to be and most of the time they sat on deck with the open night around them.

It was another long journey. It took almost five hours, north across the lake past the small islands that marked the end of America, over the invisible border, skirting round Wolfe Island, into an empty corner of the harbour at Kingston.

It had been light for a while, but they saw nothing of the city. A black Hudson waited for them at the dockside and they were soon on the road that followed the St Lawrence River, and the American border, through Ontario and Quebec, to Montreal.

By midday Stefan, Kate and Niamh were in a room in the Ford Hotel on Dorchester Boulevard. It was where the Hudson had brought them. They were asked no questions and they were not asked to register. Whoever Longie Zwillman’s friends were, everything had been paid for and there would be no record of their stay at the Ford. They would not be there long anyway. Kate and Niamh went out to buy the suitcases and clothes they needed for the trip home; not only because they needed something to wear but to make sure they looked like the ordinary passengers they were meant to be.

By the time the ravages of the last few days had been brushed off, at least off the surface, there was only an hour to go until the cab came to take the two women to the boat. There would be no dockside goodbyes though. Kate and Niamh felt safe, finally, but it was important that when they got to the boat the faster they moved up the gangway, unnoticed and anonymous in the crowd, the better. So Stefan would not go to see them off. And when he took Kate for a drink in the bar, and left Niamh to finish packing, it wasn’t about farewells either; it was to tell her that Jimmy Palmer was dead and to leave her with the task of telling her sister.

Kate understood why he had said nothing before, but she was very quiet. She knew what it would mean to Niamh. The news seemed to cut away anything that Stefan and Kate might have had to say to one another too, and in the end they said very little. What had happened between them at Lough Eske had taken them by surprise; neither of them knew whether it was anything or nothing. It was jammed about with other things, bigger things. It had been a moment of need. Did it have to be more?

Stefan had no explanation to give Kate about Dominic Carroll’s presence at the lake. It was better that she and Niamh knew nothing about what was going on. He said it was all to do with Clan na Gael; she didn’t want to know more. She had no interest in anything Dominic Carroll did now. He was something to be thrown away, as quickly as possible.

And then Kate O’Donnell and Niamh Carroll were gone; several hours before Stefan Gillespie went to the Gare Windsor for the overnight train to New York they were moving down the St Lawrence towards Quebec and the sea on the
Empress of Canada
, bound for Belfast.

For Stefan, there was no space to wonder about Kate. And for the time being he didn’t much want to. He didn’t know what it had meant to him; or perhaps he didn’t want to think about it because he didn’t know what it had meant to her. If there was going to be a time to ask, it would come later.

Now the words he had heard in the cellar at Loch Eske were in his head; he felt the ghost of John Cavendish was still at his shoulder. He phoned the number in New York that Longie Zwillman had given him to use in an emergency. Ten minutes later Zwillman phoned back. What Stefan said was oblique, but the urgency of it was clear.

‘When you get back to New York,’ said Longie, ‘the first thing you need is some fish.’

In the sleeper on the Montreal Limited, Stefan knew he wouldn’t get much sleep. He was tired enough, but Dominic Carroll’s words had stuck, and the words of Paul Eisterholz, the German-American Bund leader, and the unspoken words that weren’t even for an assortment of pro-German and anti-British zealots at the lakeside meeting.

He had had no great interest in George VI’s tour of Canada and America, but it was news that had been in the air for weeks, even in Ireland. Now the American newspapers he had bought at Windsor Station were full of it. King George and Queen Elizabeth had crossed the border at Niagara Falls; he was the first reigning British monarch ever to visit America. He had been met by President Roosevelt and he would be moving on to Washington soon, but he would be stopping off in New York first to visit the World’s Fair.

The king’s itinerary was in
The New York Times
, minute by minute. That was how these things worked. The minutes for the motorcade, the minutes for photographs, the minutes for inspecting the troops, the minutes for admiring the exhibits in the British Pavilion, the minutes for a speech and some more anodyne pleasantries, the minutes for shaking some hands and smiling at children. These things had to run like clockwork.

As he sat in the diner Stefan reflected on the big reception in Washington that would take place several days later; the reception there wouldn’t be much point anybody turning up for. If Dominic Carroll’s throwaway words meant what they could mean, there might be clockwork, real clockwork, somewhere in the king’s New York itinerary.

The Delaware and Hudson train had left Montreal at half past ten; an hour later it crossed the border into New York State at Rouses Point. Stefan would see almost nothing except the night for much of the journey as the train moved south, following the Adirondack Mountains and the Hudson River to New York.