When Shadows Fall (5 page)

“Good news, Lieutenant. You’re being invalided back to England today, I’ve had it confirmed. A chance for a wee rest and some decent grub for a change, eh? You’ll be back fighting fit before you know it.”

Adam had received severe shrapnel wounds from the grenade burst. His eyes had been temporarily blinded, and weeks later, his vision still hadn’t returned to normal. Stitched rents and gashes covered half his upper body and most of his legs. Yet nothing stirred his anger more now than the sight of Captain Blevins’s idiotic nonchalance, his infuriating
chin up, lad
approach, as though nothing had ever happened.

“I’m leaving the army, Captain.”

“Ho, ho. You say that now, Bowen, but you’d only miss it.”

“I’m leaving the army, Captain.”

“Oh, did I mention? They’re going to recommend you for the Victoria Cross for what you did, taking out those German gun posts. Even Mallory was impressed. Well deserved, too. You’ll probably have to go to Buckingham Palace to receive it—imagine!”

“I’m leaving the army, Captain.”

“Well, that’s understandable. That you’d want to. But you can’t leave without being discharged, Lieutenant, and our battalion—”

“Oh, get out.”

Blevins frowned. “Excuse me?”

“I said, get out. You’re a fool, Blevins. And a backstabber.”

Blevins stepped back before taking a breath. “You’re out of line, Lieutenant, speaking to a superior officer like that. I’ve been nothing but kind to you. I got you off that court-martial.”

“Kind to me, were you?” Adam glared at him. “A pity you weren’t so kind to Private Hannigan.”

Blevins shifted his eyes. “That’s not my responsibility. Nor my fault. But that young man—”

“He wasn’t a young man, Captain. He was a boy.” Adam gestured towards the door. “That’s our business done with each other, I think. And you can tell them where to stick that VC medal, too.”

Blevins’s face reddened. He bit his lip in anger before turning away and marching out of the station.

The memory was still vivid, months later, lying here in Brighton. Adam closed his eyes, weary in every inch of his body. His hand slipped beneath the pillow and rubbed the rough, leathery surface of Timmy’s diary. Not once had he read it, nor even opened it. But the words within seemed to reach out and voice themselves, even through that merest touch.

“I’m sorry, Private,” he whispered, remembering the wide-eyed youngster he’d taken under his wing all those years ago. “I couldn’t help you. I couldn’t bring you home. And I’m so sorry.”

Around the ward, limp-legged men and rose-cheeked nurses hugged each other and sang and raised their glasses to victory and King George and empire forever.

DUBLIN 1919

The rain had fallen softly all morning, but now it turned to hail, spiteful and loud, skittering off the limestone headstones as she knelt on the cropped grass of the cemetery. It was late evening and the unsettled sky would soon give up its light. Though merely October, winter was upon the air, and the coldness pinched the soft skin of her hands as she placed the wreath upon the pebbled grave.

Dock leaves and ragwort had resumed their dogged colonisation of the plot. She pulled them out and scattered them aside, knowing full well that their progeny was already conceived beneath the black soil. The wreath she placed was made of artificial flowers, for fresh ones would be in scant supply with the passing of summer, and she determined that the grave should have colour even through the darkness of winter.

Notwithstanding weeds and the elements, the headstone itself still glistened as new, its chiselled inscription as bold as though the engraver had only just finished. As though it were only yesterday.

She blinked against the threat of tears.

Here lies the body of William Reilly,

born 3 February 1864, died 18 January 1919

His wife Judith (n
é
e Kinsella)

born 26 November 1870, died 18 January 1919

Their son Denis Joseph

born 15 May 1894, died 18 January 1919

May the souls of the faithful departed

through the mercy of God rest in peace

Nine months of darkness. In many ways it had been a lifetime; in others the mere blink of an eye. Nothing was more vivid, however, than that day.

A frost-touched morning, a blue sky. The stirring of her parents to the new day. Father first, lighting the stove. Mother would boil water, lay a table with her home-baked bread and butter, some eggs, salted fish. Prayers would already have been said, for they were a religious family. Tara worked part-time in the school while she awaited the results of her civil service application, and she was always rushing. Her brother Denis would rise last of all, a strappy six-footer, grumbling when he couldn’t find his shirt and boots. Denis was to inherit the farm, being the only son. He was sweet on a local girl in the village, but you couldn’t get any further information from him; you could only smile knowingly at his enthusiasm for the dance hall on Saturday nights, his newfound eagerness to make church on Sunday mornings.

There had been a knock on the door on this particular morning, however. A Monday. Unusual, being so early. Her father went out. There were voices, words exchanged. Then shouting. Denis had bounded out after his father to investigate.

Then gunfire.

If Tara had been downstairs, she would have stopped her mother from following them. But she had been upstairs, mulling over outfits. Her mother ran outside too and screamed.

Another gunshot.

Tara shuddered at the memory.

The hailstones had intensified, slipping beneath her scarf and collar and sliding in icy runnels down her back. Thunder rumbled in the Dublin mountains. It would be dark soon.

She rose to her feet and shook off the wet pebbles that clung to her shoes. The cemetery was empty, a silent and desolate spot beneath the petulant sky. Peals from a nearby church made it six o’clock. The honest denizens of Dublin City would be returning from work back to warm homes and bowls of broth, or perhaps joining friends or lovers in theatres and lively taverns somewhere.

Tara walked towards the cemetery gate and closed it behind her.

Many found it odd that she wouldn’t allow her family to be buried locally in Wicklow, where they had spent their lives. But she couldn’t have tolerated it. The killer still dwelt in that place, in her childhood environs, he who had turned his gun upon her loved ones with the false accusation that they were informers reporting on his local paramilitary activities. Tara couldn’t imagine her family finding any peaceful repose there, and so the family home and farm had been sold. Instead she laid them to rest here, in Kilmainham, a quiet suburb of Dublin where she had since bought a house. Her place of employment at Dublin Castle was not far, closer towards the city centre.

It was nightfall, and the hail softened to a dull drizzle by the time she reached the main road. A brightly lit tea shop beckoned her, and she was lured by the prospect of a half hour’s warmth. She went inside, took a table by the window, and waited for someone to take her order.

The waitress was a stocky-shouldered woman in a stained linen apron. She took a pencil from behind her ear and gestured to the rain-slicked cobblestone outside. “Awful night, lovey. Just awful. And what will you be having?”

“A cup of tea, please,” Tara said. “How much is a slice of the lemon pastry?”

“Two and a ha’penny the lot, lovey.”

“Thank you.”

She put three spoons of sugar into her tea. Catholic guilt or no, she never denied her sweet tooth. The pastry was dry, flaky, but it soothed away the rumbling in her empty stomach.

“Ah, but you’re drowned with the rain, lovey.” The waitress sidled back and topped up her tea. She laid down the pot and folded her arms across the wobbly mountain of her bosom. “Have you any sense but to be out in this weather? Pale as a ghost you are. Just coming from work, are you, lovey?”

With the tea and pastry settling in her belly, Tara felt suddenly tired. “I finished early today. Just going home.”

The woman glanced at Tara’s hand, her ringless finger. “Ah, bless. Lodging nearby, are you?”

“Yes, I live nearby. But I’m not a lodger. I, um, I bought the house some time back.” She offered the information without meaning conceit, but it was taken otherwise.

“Did you now?” The primly raised eyebrows betrayed the woman’s surprise—an unmarried girl, looking barely into her twenties, owning her own house? “Well, that’s lovely, dearie. So you’ll be wanting another slice of pastry?”

“No, thank you.”

With a
humph
the waitress returned to her duties.

Tara made the second cup of tea last awhile. Having her own house didn’t necessarily make it a welcome place to retire to in the evenings. She had afforded it through the proceeds from the sale of the farm—nine hundred and forty pounds was the final bid—and thus the quiet, ten-acre grazing in Wicklow had become the three-bedroom, bricks-and-mortar terraced house in Dublin City. A million miles apart. Mother’s good-natured fussing, a big open fire, the smell of her father’s pipe, the fir tree at Christmas—all of it had been boxed away and then reborn as smoke and traffic and crowds and loneliness.

The surface of the tea in her cup was disturbed, a barely discernible ripple before it became still again. She realised she was crying.

No . . .

All day long she had held them back. What was there in tears, only more tears? There had been far too much crying between that day and this, and nothing had been achieved, no new milestone reached, no progress made. She was still in the same cold place that she had been condemned to nine months before, and her family still lay in that rain-scoured graveyard in Kilmainham up the road.

Unavenged.

She put aside the tea. She stared for a long time through the window, seeing not the darkness, but a new light of resolve and completion.

Courage braced her. For she knew what she must do.

Mother, Father, dearest Denis, I swear on your very souls, I will cry no more, and I will wait no more. He who did this to you walks free and uncaring. You are in heaven, but I will send him to hell.

When the ruddy-faced man in the woollen coat pushed in the door of Hogan’s Tavern, the customers immediately lowered their heads and their voices.

Larry Mulligan paused to sweep the room with his eyes, then lumbered on. Though short in height he was built like a bull, and the two men supping Guinness at the bar quickly departed their stools to allow the bold Mulligan his space.

“Aye now, Seamus.” Mulligan ran his fingers round his stubbled cheeks and waited for the owner to come out. Big, bearded Seamus Hogan appeared after a few seconds.

“Ah, Larry. You’re well?”

“A John Jameson, Seamus,” Mulligan said.

“Right you are. Damp old night out there, isn’t it?” Hogan poured the glass of whiskey and put in a tablespoon of water, as was Mulligan’s preference.

“Good man, Seamus.” Mulligan clasped the glass and rose up. “I’ll take it in the back room. Send the lads in to me when they arrive.”

The main front of Hogan’s building served as a grocery store, with the tavern at the side, and beyond the bar was a door that led into a room that, though it once served as a kitchen, was now a storage space for sacks of potatoes, tea leaves, nails, coal, Bulls-Eyes candy, and various other items sold from the shop counter. A small stove warmed the room and a table had been set with bread, ham, a pot of tea, and a bottle of whiskey.

This room was also one of the safer meeting points for the North Wicklow Brigade of the outlawed Irish Republican Army. Mulligan sat and lit a Woodbine, and in the bar area the conversation had resumed at his departure. The reflected stove light in the window caught his image: a face like a slab of raw meat, with an uneven fringe of brown hair and muscled shoulders that seemed about to burst through his shirt. He smiled darkly at himself.

A few minutes later two more men came in, roughly clearing their throats and pulling chairs to the table. They were much younger than Mulligan, about twenty-five, and they shook the rain from their sodden caps as they sat.