Women of Courage (78 page)

The soup came. Radford tucked his napkin under his chin, and said: ‘You’re off to London tomorrow, Colonel, I hear?’

‘That’s right. Lloyd George is presenting his bill, and he’ll want up-to-date information on the situation here. That’s one reason why I want to talk to you chaps.’ He sipped his soup, and dabbed thoughtfully at his moustache with a napkin. ‘You’ve both been in post for over a month now. What’s your candid opinion of the ability of the DMP to get to grips with this terror?’

Radford sighed. ‘Unfortunately, sir, not high.’

‘There are a few leads,’ said Kee loyally.

‘But not many, Tom. Our problem, Colonel, is that half the experienced Dublin officers, with all their local knowledge and contacts, are dead, and the rest are clinging to their mothers’ skirts in fear. In addition to which, I don’t know how, I have the impression that Collins knows everything we decide to do five minutes after we’ve decided it. So I hardly dare trust anyone. In short, the whole of the effective official police force opposed to Collins is sitting right here at this table.’

Kee said: ‘There’s Davis, too, surely?’

‘I hope so. He works hard, I’ll give him that. But I’ve only known him a few weeks. You and me, Tom, we’ve been together a long time.’

Kee shrugged. He didn’t like running down his force, even an adopted one, before a soldier, but the truth was inescapable.

Sir Jonathan glanced from one to the other. ‘Anyway, whether it’s two or three doesn’t make much difference. I get your drift. It’s you two against half the city.’

‘Right.’ They waited while the waiter brought the main course. Kee glanced around the room. Through the open door of the dining room he could see several men in civilian clothes come off the street into the foyer. The loaded revolvers beside the soup plates began to seem more of a comfort than an eccentricity.

Sir Jonathan resumed. ‘Well, that’s pretty bleak, but it’s truthful. And the fact is we’re dealing with a major political conspiracy here. A threat to destabilize the whole country, by murder if necessary. Agreed?’

Radford nodded. Kee began to eat his food, gloomily. He wondered where all this was leading.

‘And you, as the established police force, are in no position to deal with it. You agree to that too?’

‘At the moment,’ Radford said. ‘But if we could just get hold of the ringleaders, the thing would change entirely. There can’t be more than five or six at the very top. Put them behind bars and their organization would start to fall apart, and morale in the force would rise. Those men who are just serving out time at the moment would start to put their backs into the job again.’

‘Exactly.’ Sir Jonathan waved his knife emphatically. ‘And as far as I can see there are two ways to do it. Martial law and a curfew would help, and Johnny French has asked for that again. But even if the fools in the Cabinet give it to him, it’ll only help if we can lay our hands on these beggars, Collins especially. And to do that, it seems to me, we must fight them at their own game.’

Kee sipped his beer thoughtfully and said: ‘What do you mean by that, Colonel?’

The clear grey eyes stared at him coldly. I wouldn’t have liked to be up before you for a disciplinary charge, Kee thought.

‘What I mean, Detective Inspector, is that when the country is being destabilized by a group of armed thugs who have reduced the police force to a cipher and have attempted to murder the Viceroy himself, it’s time we sought out men skilled enough in the same arts of spying and assassination to fight back.’

There was a silence. The conversation in the main dining room seemed to have fallen, but it was unlikely that anyone could have heard them. Kee noted with relief that the group of men in the entrance hall seemed to have gone.

Radford said: ‘You mean we should run agents, like we did in Belfast during the war. I agree, but it will take time to set up. We can’t tap into the local network yet, because it’s all corrupt or terrified. And if we brought in an outsider he’d stand out like a sore thumb. You’d find him lying in a gutter somewhere with a cardboard sign round his neck.’

‘Maybe. It’ll take guts, I agree to that,’ Sir Jonathan said. ‘But what alternative have we got? Damn it, man, my own daughter was in that car as well. She’d have been lying in the gutter, too, if those scum had succeeded.’

The waiter cleared their plates again, and brought the dessert. Radford met Kee’s eyes across the table. He said: ‘In principle you’re right, Sir Jonathan. If Military Intelligence can find us such men, then it’s our duty to cooperate with them, though what help we can give, I’m not sure. We could provide support if called on, and channel information from G Division, to give them an idea of the layout.’

Kee snorted. ‘I’ll write the information on a postage stamp.’

Radford smiled. A Kee joke was something rare enough to be savoured. ‘Your handwriting must have improved, Tom. Don’t forget there’s all that stuff Davis keeps so carefully in those files. There must be something useful there.’

‘Two postage stamps then. But that’s not the point.’ Kee put down his spoon carefully and looked Sir Jonathan firmly in the eye. ‘You said we should seek out men who are good at spying, Colonel, and I fully agree to that. We’ll give them all the help we can. But assassination is another matter. As a policeman I’ve spent all my adult life upholding the rule of law in a Christian country, and that’s how I intend to continue. Secret murder, even of Sinn Feiners, is a thing I’ll have nothing to do with.’

Sir Jonathan reddened. For a moment Kee had the odd feeling he was going to be bawled out, publicly, here in the hotel dining room in front of the assembled company. But the blush faded and the cold grey eyes continued to examine him. Quietly, Sir Jonathan said: ‘I presume you carry a revolver, Detective Inspector?’

‘I do, sir, yes.’

‘And if Michael Collins and his thugs walked into this room now, wouldn’t you use it?’

‘To defend myself or make an arrest, sir, yes, of course. But to kill him without warning? No sir, I would not. That would be to descend to the level of the enemy, and that is not what my God or my conscience would allow me to do.’

There was a further silence. Radford sighed, and Kee wondered how much his old friend agreed with him. They had been colleagues too long for Kee not to realize the embarrassment he was causing. But there were some principles Tom Kee regarded as too important to abandon, whatever embarrassment they caused.

Sir Jonathan said: ‘If you had seen as many dead men as I have, Detective Inspector, you would realize that only a fool waits until his enemy fires first.’

‘In war, no doubt, sir. But I’m a policeman, not a soldier.’

‘This
is
a war, damn it! Ask the Sinn Feiners if you don’t believe me! Any man I recruit will risk his life as a soldier.’

The waiter was hovering again. He cleared their plates and they ordered coffee. While they were waiting for it Radford spoke hesitantly, like a man trying to throw a rope bridge across a chasm which he knew could never be crossed. ‘Naturally most men in G Division would be pleased if some of these Sinn Feiners were dead, Sir Jonathan. But in law and conscience Tom is right, of course. Officially, neither he nor I could do anything to support what would be technically murder, however justified the cause. But if your agents were to act in order to gain information leading to an arrest, then of course we would give our full support. Delighted to, in fact.’

‘The full support of the two active officers of G Division. Quite.’ Sir Jonathan stood up and pushed in his chair. His eyes held Radford’s in a long, careful stare. ‘Well, thank you, gentlemen. There may come a time when you will have to choose between your principles and your lives. However, I shall report your views to the Cabinet, if asked. No doubt the politicians will be suitably impressed.’

The waiter brought three coffees but there were only two men sitting at the table. From which, Radford thought, an astute mind might deduce that the meeting had not been an entire success.

Kee rubbed his cheek with the palm of his hand and looked at Radford across the table. ‘Sorry, Bill,’ he said. ‘If you didn’t want to hear it, you shouldn’t have asked me.’

Radford stuffed tobacco into his pipe, lit it, and regarded Kee thoughtfully through the clouds of smoke. That simple, undeviating sense of morality was one of the things he most valued about his old friend. Paradoxically, it also came between them. He said: ‘You’re too good for this world, old son.’

‘Maybe. There are times I’d rather not know what the military are thinking.’

Radford shook his head. ‘You need to know, Tom. For two reasons. First, because at any time they may be crossing your path. And secondly, because I, Bill Radford, may not always be here. Don’t worry, I fully intend to be - I’ve even ordered one of these steel and silk bullet-proof waistcoats. But I was appointed to free this city of political murderers, and that’s what I intend to do, in any way I can. These Sinn Fein bastards are getting very damned efficient, and it can’t have escaped their notice that at last there’s someone in G Division who intends to carry the fight to them. I know what I’d be thinking, if I were Michael Collins.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Kee said. ‘Because you’re a policeman, not an assassin. That’s what gives us the right to govern the country, and makes him a common murderer.’

Radford sighed. His attitude to the interview with the Colonel had been rather different. He took his pipe out of his mouth and waved it in the direction of the main entrance, where Sir Jonathan had just gone out. ‘It’s not us who govern the country, Tom,’ he said. ‘It’s men like him.’

6. A Walk by the Sea

C
ATHERINE HAD been looking for Sean for three days. He was not at the university, he did not come to the Irish class in Parnell Square, and Professor O’Connor could tell her nothing. She did not know where else to look.

She began to realize how little she knew about him. She had known he had lodgings somewhere on North Strand, but she had never been there, and clearly there was no point going there now. She had teased him about being a gunman, but never really believed, before Ashtown, that he was actively involved with the Volunteers. She had not realized, until now, that they always met on his terms, when he chose. If he wanted to, he could just completely disappear. It intrigued and annoyed her at the same time.

She had not realized, either, how much she needed to see him. The war, and her isolation at Killrath, had kept her out of the company of young men, and those whom she had met, even at UCH, she had mostly scorned, until now. She felt they were too like pale versions of her brothers; they had no mystery for her. Sean was the first young man she had really kissed; and when she had kissed him once he had got into her system like a drug so that she wanted to do it again and again. The meetings after lectures, the evenings at Parnell Square, the slow walks home after a drink in a pub, had become the high points of her life, with everything in between grey, unsatisfactory. She studied and ran the house in a daze, and lay restless in bed at night, dreaming of him, sometimes kissing the soft parts of her hand as though it were his lips.

And now at a stroke he had become an Irish revolutionary hero, and vanished. She felt like an addict deprived of her drug. It made him more appealing than before, and less attainable. On her way to and from college she found herself scrutinizing every young man, seeking a certain shape of the face, a smile, a turn of the hand, that would be his.

On Sunday she went to a Christmas party at University College Hospital, given in a ward for the incurably shell-shocked. Professor O’Connor had insisted that all his students attend, and Catherine had come because Sean had promised to be there. But that had been before Ashtown. He was not there at the beginning, and she sat for an interminable hour on the bed of a one-armed ex-soldier. The man began by slyly trying to persuade her to diagnose an illness in his lower stomach, and ended by fulminating against his wife who had abandoned him for a cowardly stay-at-home Sinn Feiner. The man in the next bed had his children there, dressed up in beautifully starched and crimped pinafores and ribbons for their father’s glazed, unrecognizing eyes to ignore. The nurses in their tall white hats gathered a group around the Christmas tree and crib. A student played the piano and the professor led carol-singing. The male students’ voices were loud, defiant, jolly. One of the patients had a fine tenor, three were raucous, and the rest sang like ghosts. Their mouths moved, but the sound that came out was scarcely detectable. Catherine only heard it because the singers sang more slowly than the piano, so that they did not quite finish when everyone else did. She shivered. It was the sort of whispered singing she could imagine hearing alone in a graveyard at night.

She felt irritable and guilty. Professor O’Connor was right. These were the people she was training to serve. This was what it was like, being a doctor. But she could not focus her mind on the patients at all.

Then Sean came in, and the room filled with sunlight.

He sat on the bed, helping her patient unwrap his present, and winked at her. She had thought he would look different, somehow; she found herself looking for lines on his face, or scars. But there were none; only the smooth skin, as though he scarcely shaved; the grin from the wide, cheerful mouth; the smooth, neatly combed hair. The hazel eyes watching her - a little tired perhaps, but happy, unafraid.

For a moment she felt not love as she had expected, but anger. A voice inside her screamed that he should look hard and cold and guilty. If that bomb had come inside the car I would be a broken cripple like these men here. But the voice cried in a wilderness and was forgotten. He could not have meant to hurt her, he hadn’t known she was there. He had risked his own life, and he was here, unharmed, at her side!

He smiled at her, and only the smile mattered, not what might have been. She felt oddly light and tender all over, curiously detached from the world.

On the way out of the ward Sean took her hand. ‘I was going to Sandymount for a walk. Would you come with me?’