Women of Courage (75 page)

So why was he upset today? Almost certainly, the young man on the road in front of them was one of those who had been waging war upon G Division. Kee knew who their leader was: Michael Collins. Since 1916, Collins had been a member of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Formed in the 1860s, the IRB, the successor to the Fenians, had always been the main target of Dublin Castle’s intelligence service. It considered its Supreme Council to be the legitimate government of Ireland, and thus all the established police and government agencies to be its enemies. Which wouldn’t have mattered much, if Collins hadn’t also been an elected Member of Parliament, the Finance Minister of Dail Eireann, and the Adjutant-General, Director of Intelligence, and Director of Organization in the Irish Volunteers - the body of armed men who had opposed conscription during the war, risen in 1916, and were now increasingly referring to themselves as the Irish Republican Army.

If there was one man whom Tom Kee wanted to interview more than any other, it was Michael Collins.

But the man was as slippery as Robin Hood. The city was his forest; he could move where he liked in it, safe, invisible. Everyone knew about him, no one had seen him. Kee was not even sure what the man looked like. In weeks of patient investigation he had not come across anyone who could give him a positive lead to Collins, or any of his assassins.

Until today. A dead boy in the road. The sort of boy he saw hundreds of times a day, serving behind counters, cycling from one place to another with deliveries. Only this one had a German automatic pistol clutched in his dead fingers. If he had been alive, Kee could have questioned him. But bodies could tell stories too. Kee handed the Parabellum to Davis, and started to search the pockets of the pathetic figure in front of him.

In the other pockets he found a handkerchief, clips of cartridges, a cycle-repair kit, and a Mills bomb. Kee took it out carefully and handed it to a uniformed constable. In the inside pocket, a toothbrush, a comb, a packet of cigarettes, a wallet.

Kee opened the wallet. Money, some postage stamps, and a folded letter. He unfolded it. Kee was a highly emotional man, and his job was a constant struggle to hide this, especially when interviewing suspects. When he succeeded he put on a heavy, stolid, uncomprehending look. It helped to let people think he was stupid, and gave him time to evaluate every reaction. But this time, as he read the letter, he could not prevent a slow, deep smile spreading across his face.

The letter appeared to be a receipt. It read:

Mr J. Kirk, Grocer, North Strand, Dublin. 20 October 1919.

Received from my tenant, Mr Martin Savage, the sum of £4 10s 6d, to be held safe by me until such time as he shall demand it.

Signed: J. Kirk.

Kee read it twice, carefully, and then handed it to Davis. ‘There you are, my boy. Maybe we’ve found a clue for once. Will you start up that infernal machine of yours, and we’ll go and pay a visit on Mr Kirk right now, shall we?’

An hour later, as he lit the gas mantle in the second of the two rooms at the top of the grocer Kirk’s house in North Strand, Kee felt more disgust than before. The first room, Martin Savage’s, had been small, untidy, sparsely furnished as he had expected. An iron bed in the corner, a fireplace, a bucket of coal, two shabby armchairs with some socks drying on them, a desk and chair under the window. A crucifix with a bleeding heart over the mantelpiece, and a photograph of a man and woman standing solemnly outside a rough stonebuilt cottage. The one across the corridor, belonging to the dead boy’s friend, was smaller than the first, and tidier. Very tidy indeed, Kee thought, for a young man. The bed was made, and there were no clothes strewn about. A pair of shoes was arranged neatly under the bed, by the chamber-pot. Kee would have approved of it, had it not been for the bleeding crucifixion on the wall.

Such things struck him as idolatrous, extravagant, sinful. The son of a staunch Presbyterian docker from north Belfast, Kee had grown up with the idea that beauty existed in much simpler things. A clean, neat house with a warm fire and an honest woman in it. A great factory throbbing with industry. The smooth cover of a well-worn Bible. The clear knowledge of right and wrong. All things that seemed to be missing from Dublin in the winter of 1919.

There were twenty or thirty books in the bookcase by the wall. Kee examined the titles curiously. Several works of history, including Griffith’s
The Resurrection of Hungary
, which Kee knew was read as a blueprint for how Sinn Fein should gain independence in Ireland. Another, entitled
What Germany Could Do for Ireland
, appeared to set out all the advantages to Ireland of Britain losing the war.

There were a few novels, including G. K. Chesterton’s
The Man Who Was Thursday;
and a shelf and a half of medical textbooks, most bought second-hand but still quite expensive. What did that mean? Only a medical student would have these, surely?

He turned to the desk, and his suspicions were confirmed. There was a half-finished essay on diseases of the blood, and a file of lecture notes and diagrams. Kee was elated, and puzzled. It should be easy enough to find out the boy’s name from these; yes, there it was at the top. Brennan. Sean Brennan. The university should have full details of its students.

But could a medical student be an assassin? Kee had been a policeman long enough to know that anything was possible, but the idea disgusted him. They took an oath to save life, didn’t they, not throw Mills bombs into cars?

Kee wondered if he had made a mistake. There was something guileless, innocent, about the room. There were the books, certainly, but books on their own did not kill. There were two photographs on the mantelpiece; one of a middle-aged couple with some children, the other of a young man.

He picked up the second, and showed it to Kirk. ‘Is this him? Sean Brennan?’

There was a hesitation, then a sullen nod. Kee studied the photograph. It confirmed the impression of innocence. The face was more like that of a choirboy than a killer. Clean-cut, with smooth, downy cheeks - Kee glanced towards the washbasin to check that there was shaving tackle there - and short, slicked-back dark hair. A broad forehead, bright, intelligent-looking eyes, stick-out ears, and a wide, cheeky smile. Someone I wouldn’t mind for my son-in-law, Kee thought, if he were a bit older.

He handed it to Davis. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

‘Nice lad.’

‘I mean, could he have done it? A boy like that?’

Davis hesitated. ‘Why not? Boys like that were dying in the trenches until last year.’

‘Yes, but that was a war. This is murder we’re talking about, Dick.’

‘True.’ Davis looked at his boss, thinking how foreign he was to the city. Maybe he came from the same island, but it was from a different culture, a different background altogether. It would be very difficult to enlighten him, even if he wanted to. Davis didn’t want to. So he said: ‘Some people are just evil.’

A few minutes later, as he went through the neatly folded shirts, vests, and underpants in the chest of drawers, Kee was forced to agree. Underneath the shirts, at the back of the bottom drawer, was a box of German 9-mm ammunition.

The sort that would fit a Parabellum automatic.

4. Merrion Square

T
HE DUBLIN House of the O’Connell-Gorts was an imposing, four-storey mansion in Merrion Square. As a child, Catherine had regarded it as an Aladdin’s cave of pleasure and happiness; as an adolescent, she had hated it as a nest of evil; as a young woman, she had come to be its mistress.

As a child, she had come to the house for Christmas and for the Dublin season, which lasted for six weeks afterwards. It had belonged to her Gort grandparents then, and she remembered it as a time of parties, treasure hunts, skating in the park, great candle-lit meals, laughter, and music. Always music, and fine, rustling, many-layered dresses, for there were balls in the square nearly every night. The carriages would come rattling into the square, full of gay young debutantes, the windows would be thrown open, and no one would sleep until one or two in the morning. Her grandparents would always throw their own ball, and that would be the grandest of all. Catherine and her brothers would stay up all night, rushing in and out of the ballroom, their eyes wide at the extravagance of gorgeous dresses and uniforms.

She remembered her parents opening the ball, the handsomest couple there. Always her father and grandfather would dance with her, and she would go crimson with the pleasure of it. One night, when she was eleven, the Viceroy’s ADC had danced with her, and everyone had clapped because she had done it so well. Afterwards, he had sat her on his knee and fed her bonbons, and she had asked him to wait for her until she was old enough to marry him.

The next year, her grandparents had died, her father had inherited the house, and her mother began to go mad.

Catherine had not understood why, at first. She had been only twelve years old, and thought her mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. Not only beautiful, but powerful, important too, because of her beauty. Artists painted her, poets worshipped her; even the Viceroy bowed his head and kissed her hand. But in that year, 1913, something had happened, and her mother had never gone to Merrion Square again.

It showed itself first as eccentricity and weeping. Her mother had taken to going for long lonely walks across their estate in west Galway, coming home wet and bedraggled and then shutting herself up alone in her room for days on end. The poets and painters were banished, and replaced by doctors. Catherine’s brothers went away to boarding school and her father to the army. Only Catherine was left with her governess in the big house by the wide, empty sea, 200 miles from Dublin, to witness the long slow collapse of the mother she had so admired.

Her father said it was a disease, and certainly, Maeve O’Connell-Gort was ill. Her once fine bones became gaunt, skeletal under a paper-fine skin; her eyes wide, dark, haunted. But she would not accept that she was ill. ‘The body itself is only an expression of the mind, my dear,’ she had whispered to Catherine, one dark winter evening in west Galway, while an Atlantic gale howled around the rafters of their house, Killrath. ‘I was beautiful once because I was loved, and you are beautiful because you are a child of that love. Now your father has abandoned me, and there is nothing left. It is not my body, it is my heart that is broken.’

And so Catherine learned of her father’s English mistress, Sarah Maidment, who had usurped her mother’s place in the Dublin house in Merrion Square. For seven years Catherine had visited the house only once, under duress. Sarah Maidment had put herself out, bringing Catherine dresses from England and arranging visits to the theatre in the hope of winning her over as she had done with her brothers. But Catherine had thanked her, curtsied, and then scarcely spoken again for the whole visit. She had put her foot through the skirts of the dresses so she could not wear them, and then left them behind.

Sarah Maidment was a rather short, round woman with the beginnings of a double chin, which made it easy to despise as well as hate her. She had turned most of the house into a hospital for wounded soldiers, which was very admirable, no doubt; but Catherine had refused to help. Her interest in medicine grew out of a desire to help her mother, not these strangers. So she ignored them, saying the war was against Ireland’s interests, anyway, so the soldiers should not have gone.

It had not been a happy visit.

And now her two brothers and her mother were dead, and Mrs Maidment was in a nursing home in Bournemouth. So Sir Jonathan had asked Catherine to be mistress of the house. It was part of a deal they had made between them. There was little love in it.

They had made the deal ten months ago, in the big dining room where she had once waltzed with her father and the ADC. When Catherine saw it after the war, it was stripped bare. All the paintings had gone, the wallpaper was stained and scribbled on, there was a single dim lightbulb in the chandelier. The last of the wounded had been carried out, but there were still two hospital beds in a corner.

Sir Jonathan had been in his army uniform. His riding boots echoed on the bare floorboards. Catherine had worn a bright, defiant red dress with high button boots. She sat on one of the beds and swung them, looking at him.

He said: ‘You know Sarah - Mrs Maidment - is dying. She has cancer of the lungs. She has a few more months, that’s all.’

At least she’ll be thinner, Catherine thought, viciously. But she said: ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Are you?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Well. I . . . I’ve thought of marrying her, you know. We’ve discussed it.’ He looked at her for a reaction but there was none visible. ‘She has two children, grown-up boys. By her husband, of course, they are no relation of yours. They are all quite poor.’

Catherine looked away from him, out of the window. Her mother had been dead for less than a year. She still loved her father but she despised him, too, for what he had done.

‘Mrs Maidment’s sons are no responsibility of mine but they are decent fellows. Both did their bit in the war; one lost an arm. Neither has a job yet -
are you listening to me?’

She had got up and walked to the window. It was so painful to hear. Without turning round she said: ‘Yes, Father.’

‘If I married Sarah, they could inherit this house, and my part of the estate. It would be a reward for virtue. But they are not my family, and you . . . are.’

She turned to face him. ‘I see. You think I don’t deserve to inherit?’

She was tall, and the lift of her chin made her, though she did not know it, both desirable and terrifying to most young men. To her father, the look reminded him of his wife, as she had been when he loved her. Before she had become ill, and mad, and impossible to live with. Before he had left her for the comfort of Sarah Maidment. Catherine looked to him like Maeve’s ghost, come back to haunt him.

‘You never expected to become a great heiress, and you never would have done if your brothers had not given their lives for their country. You would not have been poor, but …’