Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  Sean hurried after them, leaving Daly a little behind, as they had agreed. Walking briskly, he passed the two men, and by the next junction he guessed he was a dozen or so yards ahead. He stood here, looking up and down, as though uncertain which way to go. Then he turned round. The two detectives were a couple of yards behind him.

  Radford was looking straight at him. He smiled. Sean thought: My God he knows who I am! He must have seen the photograph. What do I do now?

  Then he went past. The smile was not for Sean. Radford was talking to Davis, in a strong Belfast accent, about rugby. Sean stood where he was, until Daly came up.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, boy, you were close enough! You don’t think he recognized you?’

  ‘If he did, he’s done nothing about it.’

  Daly looked around. The street was busy, but the two detectives were nowhere to be seen. He began to relax. ‘True. Well, we’ve seen his face now. There’s no way you can forget it?’

  Sean shook his head. Every detail of Radford’s face was imprinted in his mind. The heavy, firm jaw, quick, intelligent eyes, sandy moustache, the creases in the cheeks. There had been a pleasant, bluff, open air about the man - that was what disturbed him most. A bit like one of his housemasters at school, the one who had taught maths and hurling. He and Sean had had arguments in their time, but he had been a decent enough sort, in his way.

  But this Radford was a policeman from Belfast. He’s not a schoolmaster, Sean thought, don’t think it. He can put me or Paddy or Michael Collins or any of us in a little stone cell for years if he wants to. That’s his job. That’s what he’s come to our city to do. Maybe he’s got a nice smile and is fond of dogs and children. Forget all that. It’s not personal. It’s not going to be done out of hatred, as the priest said. It’s my duty as a soldier. A blood sacrifice for my country. That’s all there is to it.

  21. A Man in the Street

  THE AFTERNOON was long and slow. Sean wished the time would move faster. He and Daly shared a pie and a pint in a pub, and then walked across the city to Harcourt Street. They checked the entrances to the Standard Hotel, and then walked back along the street to the Castle, thinking which way someone might choose from there to the hotel. If Radford was going to visit the Castle at all today. It was probable, but not certain. They had no way of knowing. In the end they decided to stand as near as they could to the hotel, and walk down the road towards the man when they saw him coming. A quick shot in the head should do it. There was no shortage of ways to escape afterwards.

  The bellboy in the hotel was one of Collins’s informants, and he told Daly that dinner was not served until six thirty in the evening, and most of the British officers didn’t return to the hotel much before then. So then there was nothing to do but wait. Daly decided that it was pointless, indeed dangerous, to hang about in the street all afternoon, so they split up and agreed to meet again at half past five.

  Sean walked towards the church, with half an idea of making his confession. As he washed himself, this morning, it had seemed a good idea. Then he had felt pure, clear, certain; now his emotions were more violent, unsettled. I need to be in control of what I feel, he thought. But I don’t think a priest can do that for me now. Not now. Not today, with what I have to do.

  He went to St Stephen’s Green and strolled around the park, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his coat. It was a cold, cloudy afternoon, and the place was full of mothers and nannies with prams and little children, out for a breath of fresh air and a chance to feed the ducks. Sean felt a great surge of unfocused anger, so that he had to walk quickly, scowling, to release the energy of it. I must get a grip on this, he thought. I must use it and control it or I’ll make a mess of the killing this evening. And it mustn’t be in hatred, the priest said that.

  The worst of it was, he wasn’t sure what he was angry about. Catherine’s face rose up before him in a daydream, unwanted, smiling lasciviously, and then scornful, waving the piece of sponge which she - ah, what did that matter? It was her idea but I wanted it too, how can I blame her for taking precautions, even if …?

  She should have told me.

  I didn’t want to know. I still don’t want to know.

  He began to realize he was angry with himself, for wanting what he had no right to have, what she had no right to give him. And he thought: Why? Why shouldn’t we have it?

  Because it’s just wrong. To do that in a squalid slum, with people quarrelling all round, and babies climbing up the stairs and crawling in the gutters outside; now that the magic was broken it seemed he had done something dirty, disgusting. And with a fine well-brought up girl like that who used to think of me as some kind of hero. Well, she wanted it too. Maybe they’re all like that, depraved from too many centuries of lording it over the peasantry, longing to be thrown on their backs by some farmer’s boy …

  He noticed a clock outside a hotel. Four twenty-five. You mustn’t think like this, Sean, he told himself. I mustn’t think of this at all. I’m not some ignorant farmer’s boy, she’ll see that tomorrow in the papers, and Catherine doesn’t matter to me anyway. What matters is to do my duty well and cleanly and think of every possible thing that can go wrong so that I’m ready for it.

  He had checked his pistol three times already. It was cleaned and loaded. All he had to do was pull back the safety catch, cock it, and fire. No problem there.

  Radford was known to wear body armour so it would have to be a shot in the head from close up. They would walk quickly towards the man from the same direction, so that they didn’t fire at each other by mistake.

  What if he wasn’t alone?

  If there were two men they would take one each, Daly had said. If there were more than two they would call it off.

  If the street was crowded with women and children?

  It won’t be, Daly had said. Not at that time of day. But if it is, we call it off.

  What if Radford smiles at me, as he did this morning, and I think he’s just like my old schoolmaster?

  If he does that I’ll kill him all the same. It’s not personal, I don’t hate him. We all have to die one day. He’s an old man anyway, nearly fifty by the looks. And Martin died, because of men like him.

  And if my hand shakes and I can’t do it?

  You will. It’s easy. Just like giving an injection or slipping a scalpel into a corpse. I’d be doing that today if I wasn’t busy here. Unpleasant the first time but easy after that, like cutting butter. All you have to do is hold yourself still inside, forget Catherine and everything else, and just think of the policeman’s face and your finger on the trigger and bring the two together and that’s it.

  Bang.

  Finish. Walk away.

  Sean glanced at the clock again and decided it was time to return to Harcourt Street. He strode purposefully across the park, a fresh-faced, handsome young man in a brown coat and flat cap, frowning slightly in concentration. Once a couple of toddlers blocked the path, staggering energetically after a duck. The smallest, a little boy, fell flat on his face in front of Sean’s feet, and started to cry. Sean bent down and picked him up.

  Surprised, the child stopped crying. He stared, wide-eyed, at the face of the stranger who was trying to set him back on his feet. Sean gave him a winning smile. The boy smiled hesitantly back.

  Then the mother came and took the little boy’s hand. Sean touched his cap, thrust his hand back deep into his coat pocket where it clutched the butt of the 9-mm Parabellum, and strode briskly away.

  That evening, Tom Kee sat in the downstairs bar of the Standard Hotel. He was in a corner by himself, with a nearly untouched pint in front of him, looking out of the window. He didn’t want to be disturbed. In a few minutes he was going to have to tell Bill Radford about the failure of the raid on the tenement, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

  For most of their working life, he and Radford had been close and shared everything together. The discovery that Radford had kept an important secret from him had hurt
Kee deeply.

  It grew worse the more he thought about it. He could understand that Butler, the agent, hadn’t trusted G Division. That was good sense; it showed the man knew his job, and had a healthy understanding of the dangers of trusting anyone in this benighted city. But nevertheless Radford should have known, beyond any doubt at all, that he, Tom Kee, could keep the secret. Not only that, but he needed to know about it, so that he could take the basic precautions to ensure that the raid was a success. Instead of charging into the street at the last minute and bungling it, like the Keystone Kops.

  That hurt. Radford hadn’t trusted him, and the raid had been bodged.

  But worse still, in Kee’s opinion, were the underlying reasons for it. He remembered the conversation he had had with Radford and the army colonel before Christmas, about the idea of working with agents from Military Intelligence. Kee hadn’t liked it, then or now. Maybe the Sinn Feiners thought they were fighting a war, but in fact they were criminal murderers who should be arrested and put on trial. Going out to deliberately shoot them was wrong.

  Kee was absolutely sure about this. Of course, he himself carried a gun, and he was quite prepared to shoot if he had to. But there was a clear distinction between that and going out with the deliberate intention of killing someone. Policemen did the first; soldiers, spies, assassins and murderers did the second.

  What hurt Kee was the belief that the man Butler had not been sent to arrest Collins, but to kill him.

  The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that Radford hadn’t told him about Butler’s plans because he knew he wouldn’t approve. Radford hadn’t cared too much about the details of the raid, because he thought they were going to find dead IRA Volunteers in the house, who wouldn’t need to be arrested.

  Why else had Butler taken a leather bag to the house, with two loaded automatic pistols?

  Kee looked at his watch, and took a sip of his beer. He was going to confront his old friend and superior with his suspicions tonight, and his mouth was dry with apprehension. Their friendship had lasted for many years, and he hoped it would survive the confrontation. But if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be worth keeping. What sort of friendship would we have, he thought, if one of us was afraid to speak up when he thought the other was stepping over the line between daring police work, and conspiracy to murder?

  Kee had hoped he would be able to impress Radford at the same time with the results of orthodox police work. At midnight last night he had raided the tenement, together with the young detective Foster and a platoon of soldiers. He had to take the soldiers; it would have been madness not to. Half of them had been posted outside, to watch the back and front of the building, and make sure no one escaped over the roof. The rest had come in with him, banging on the doors of the inhabitants, herding them into terrified little groups in the middle of their squalid rooms, guarded by Tommies with tin hats and rifles. While Kee and Foster raced up the stairs, trying door after door to see which room Brennan would be in.

  He had been in none of them.

  The room they had finally identified as his was quite empty. It had been little more than a large cupboard, with a creaky bed by the wall, a fireplace, a table and chair, a scrap of carpet on the floor, a window. Kee had looked out of the window. A twenty-foot drop to a concrete yard with an open drain and some dustbins. No escape there. And there were no possessions in the room - only a burnt saucepan, some holey blankets on the bed, a pillow and mattress that must have been old when Queen Victoria was born, and a pile of sticks, newspaper and coal. The ashes in the fireplace were cold.

  Kee had sat on the bed, sick with disappointment, and tried to imagine the proud, beautiful young girl from Merrion Square in this room. He couldn’t. It was too squalid. And yet Foster had been adamant and Kee believed him. There must be something seriously wrong in that girl’s mind, he thought.

  But that was beside the point. Brennan was still at large. Ordinary police work had failed again. Kee had kept the details of the operation back from Radford, hoping to surprise him. Now he would just look devious, and the rift between them would widen.

  So now he sat in the bar of the Standard Hotel and waited for Radford. It was already twenty past six. He looked out of the window. In the semidarkness, an army lorry rumbled past, followed by a tram that clanked to a stop opposite the hotel, its bell jingling eerily. It was misty outside, he noticed; he could only see the tram indistinctly, through swathes of vapour tinged yellow and orange by the gaslights. If it got much worse no one would be able to see anything, and all traffic would seize up for the night. The combination of a still, damp, windless night, and over a million coal fires, could produce a Dublin fog to rival any ‘London particular’.

  If Radford doesn’t come soon, Kee thought, he may not make it at all.

  The gradually thickening yellow fog made Sean nervous. On the one hand, of course, it was a good thing, because it made their continued presence in Harcourt Street much less obvious to anyone who might be watching. By six thirty, visibility was down to twenty yards. But on the other hand, it was making it harder to keep a lookout for Radford.

  He and Paddy had worked out a system. One of them would stand quietly in a doorway about ten yards from the hotel. The dripping brass plate on the door showed that the house was used by a dentist, and he appeared to have gone home by now. The other one would stroll slowly along the pavement away from the hotel, in the direction of Dublin Castle, until he was nearly out of sight of the first. Then he would cross the road, walk back on the other side, and they would change places.

  If the man on the pavement saw someone who might be Radford, he was to signal it to the other by taking out a handkerchief and blowing his nose. Then he was to wait until the suspect came up, and if it was Radford, shoot him in the head. The man in the doorway was to come up as fast as he could, to help finish him off, if necessary. If there were too many passers-by, the first man was to engage Radford in conversation until the other people had gone on, while the second man walked casually up and shot him.

  If Radford approached the hotel from the wrong end of the street, then at least the man in the doorway was near enough to the hotel to see him go in. Then they could both go home.

  Sean thought about the plan as he paced slowly down the pavement. The fog seemed to fill the street with so many strange noises which he didn’t usually notice. Some were muffled, some sharpened and magnified out of all proportion. He knew there was a tram somewhere, because the ringing of its bell was as clear in his head as though he were on it. Yet he couldn’t see the machine, or hear its engine; he wasn’t even sure which direction it was coming from. There were bicycle bells too, and the clip of a horse’s hooves coming quite surprisingly fast. From down by the river, the hoot of a foghorn boomed every half-minute; and occasionally the chatter of conversation carried to him, disconcertingly, out of shops and doorways he couldn’t quite see.

  The twenty yards’ walk away from Paddy had come to seem like some frightening odyssey into the unknown. The further he got from Paddy, the more lonely he felt. Apart from the sounds, there were the shapes: strange, indeterminate thickenings of the mist under the gaslights, which suddenly coalesced into something meaningful - a tram, a bicycle, a pedestrian. And if it was a pedestrian, there was so little time, in twenty yards, to know if it was Radford or not. Only a quarter of an hour ago they had nearly killed the wrong man: only at the last minute had Sean seen Paddy waving energetically from behind the victim, and realized the mistake. Same height, same build, wrong face.

  He had lowered the pistol to his side and by some freak the pedestrian appeared not to have noticed it. They had watched him, and he had not gone into the hotel.

  But although they had both been shaken, they had not given up.

  ‘Not yet,’ Paddy had said. ‘Tonight’s the best chance we’ll have, if we just keep our nerve. Another half-hour and he must come.’

  And Sean had agreed.

  It would be terrible to give up
now. All day he had spent nerving himself for it; to give up and walk away now would be a waste, impossible. Before the near mistake he had felt as clear in his mind as he ever had; quite cold, concentrated on the one thing he had to do, empty of all other thoughts. There was something almost religious, mystical about it.

  Now the feeling was a little more ragged, fraying like a flag that has been flying in the storm too long; but he still thought he could hold out for another ten minutes. Radford must come soon.

  He reached the end of his beat, and looked back. Paddy was only partly visible - a dark shape beside a blur that was a doorway, with the mist behind him glowing from the invisible hotel lights beyond. Time to cross the road and go back. The noises were more eerie than ever. It sounded as though the foghorn had come closer, and there was the clanking of a bell that was quite unlike a tram. Sean peered into the mist ahead, and then stepped out into the road.

  Halfway across, a dark shape began to loom towards him. A bell clanked and a foghorn groaned. It was this, he realized, that was making the noises. Whatever was it? He reached the other pavement, and waited.

  Jesus, Mary and Joseph - it looked like a horse with horns! Sean shuddered and almost crossed himself - on a night like this the banshee and God knows what else could not be entirely dismissed. He stared at it wildly and then realized. Right here in the middle of the city at six o’clock some desperate peasant was driving a dogcart down Harcourt Street with a cow between the shafts! A cow with a bell hanging on its chest, for Christ’s sake!

  Sean didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He turned to check Paddy and the rest of the street and then he heard the voice.

  ‘Are you lost then, Seamus?’

  ‘Never in life, sir. I do be after taking the short cut home, is all!’