The tunnel, she remembered, was about nine hundred yards long. The ventilation shaft and ladder was about halfway, they had reckoned when she had first explored it. They had spent a day, last summer, herself and Aoife, lying up on the flowering grasses, hidden from sight by the whitethorn bush, and listening to the birds singing until they suddenly stopped at the approach of a train. This train that they had met at the level crossing would go out to Bandon, would stop there. The engine would go around and the train would make its way back to Cork in about an hour. But how long had they been ducking and dodging around the hedges and bushes? She should have checked the time. It couldn’t have been a whole hour. Nevertheless she had an uneasy feeling.
The mouth of the tunnel was now visible – a pale grey arch. Surely that would put heart into Sam! Feeling much warmer, she slowed down and then stopped, waiting for him to catch up. She flattened herself with her back to the rough wall and looked back. For a moment, she could see nothing. It was much blacker behind her than in front. ‘Oh, come on,’ she whispered impatiently. What was wrong with him? ‘Try to keep up with me,’ she whispered when he came slowly into view. ‘We’ll be out soon.’
He made no answer and she thought that his breath sounded loud in the confined darkness. Surely he couldn’t be out-of-breath, crawling along so slowly? Eileen turned and went on. She didn’t run, though. She had to stay with him. He was her responsibility.
And then a heart-stopping noise. It was the sound of the steam whistle which was mounted on the boiler of the train. And it was coming from in front of her. The Bandon train must be returning to Cork instead of going on to Bantry.
Eileen’s first instinct was to run. Perhaps if she ran at full speed, she could beat the train. But she knew, even if she could achieve that, Sam would be left behind. He couldn’t even keep up with a slow run. Desperately she looked backwards. They were nearer to the tunnel exit than the ladder shaft. It was not worth it to go back.
Soon there would be a train thundering along at full speed. All they could do was flatten themselves against the wall and hope for the best. But now other fears entered her mind. Would there be room for them? She had a strong impression that the train itself was wider than the sunken space occupied by the rails, that doors, door handles and footboards would overhang the ledge on which they were walking. She remembered when she and Aoife had peered down from their hiding place by the blackthorn bush that it had appeared as though the train filled every inch of the tunnel.
‘Quick,’ she said in a voice that even she heard was full of panic. ‘Quick, Sam, run as fast as you can. We must get out of here before the train gets into the tunnel.’
The noise of the train was louder than ever. She could see the steam and sparks ahead of them. It was getting to the mouth of the tunnel more quickly than she had guessed it could do. It sounded its whistle, a signal to passengers to pull up the carriage windows or else their clothes and the upholstered seats would be covered with sticky black smuts. She looked over her shoulder, and her heart gave a lurch. Sam was a long way behind her, moving clumsily, banging his shoulder against the protruding rock and stopping to rub it. She could have screamed but there was no point. Her mind had suddenly remembered something.
The main ventilation shaft, the one with the well-secured iron ladder, was too far back, but now she suddenly remembered that there were others, not well-built like the one they’d come down, but just about a foot wide, and a foot deep, really just a groove chipped out of the rock with an iron grid above it. Probably a place where a narrow ladder could be inserted if the grid needed attention.
Better than nothing, she thought, and said over her shoulder, ‘Just a little further, Sam.’
And then she began to run. She heard him behind her, breathing hard as if he was doing a hundred-yard sprint. Now the pale grey of the arched end of the tunnel was stabbed with two glaring lights in the distance. Only another few seconds and it would be upon them. Should she stop and face the tunnel wall and hope for the best? But something stubborn within her insisted that she should go on.
‘Quick, Sam,’ she yelled. There was no point in trying to be quiet now. The whole countryside, including the soldiers, would be deafened by the noise of the train. She glanced back once – she supposed that he was trying his best, but he was lagging further and further behind.
And then she saw it from the corner of her eye. A gleam of light from overhead and she had almost missed it. The groove in the rock was slightly less shallow than she remembered.
‘Sam! We must wait here. Squash against the rock!’ Her voice trembled and the noise was becoming deafening. Then with one defiant shriek from the whistle, the train entered the tunnel.
Suddenly Sam was beside her. He squeezed in behind her, his body pushed into hers. The dark prison clothes would melt into the rock; at least she hoped so. She hated feeling helpless. The jagged rock pressed into her, but she forced herself not to flinch. The noise was dreadful, sickening and unbearable, as the train passed in a tornado that seemed to rock the whole tunnel. For a moment she feared that it would snatch up their bodies and carry them along in its progress. The air was boiling hot and the smoke stung her eyes. Even so, she caught a glance of the train’s fireman. He had seen them. His grotesquely blackened face was turned towards them, the shovel poised mid-air, and the mouth dropped open showing strangely white teeth, the eyes wide and staring.
But then the train reached the end of the tunnel, and the noise began to fade.
‘Come on, Sam. That fireman saw us. Let’s move!’ Sam didn’t seem to be listening. He was bending down, his hands holding on to his legs, just above the knees. For a moment she thought that he was vomiting. There was a strange hooping sound coming from him.
‘Sam,’ she began, knowing that she sounded impatient, but it was for his safety that she was worried. ‘Come on, Sam,’ she said again and then realized that he was not vomiting. He was trying desperately to breathe.
‘My asthma!’ he choked the words out and for a moment she felt relieved. Loads of people got asthma. A girl in her class used to go up to newly tarred poles and breathe in the fumes of the shining black sticky stuff, which seemed to help her. Some people said smoking was good for it, though the smoke from the train seemed to have made him worse. Their only hope now was to get out into the countryside and to hide behind hedges and bushes until darkness fell. When and if the search was called off they could make their way to the farmhouse.
But Sam was not getting any better. His breathing was terrible. He tried to straighten up, but then went back to holding his legs again. Timidly she rubbed his back and then when that didn’t seem to do anything she hit him sharply between the shoulder blades. She remembered her mother doing that to her when she had choked over a piece of stale bread.
It didn’t seem to work with Sam. He moved impatiently away from her, and stretched his hands upwards against the rock face. It seemed that he was willing himself to breathe, dragging in air with sounds like the creaking of a rusty hinge, but it was no good. He made desperate croaking sounds ending with a strangely high-pitched cawing noise. And then he managed to cough, not a satisfying cough that might clear his lungs, but a harsh metallic explosion that rang through the tunnel.
‘Smoke …’ he said with difficulty, and then, with a great effort, ‘can’t breathe.’
‘Let’s get you out of here,’ she said. ‘You’ll be fine once we get into the fresh air.’
She took his arm and endeavoured to pull him along the narrow ledge. He tried, frantically hard, gulping for air. But every yard or so, he had to stop and bend, doubled over, desperately holding his legs.
‘Imagine my arm is a rope,’ she said. ‘Just pull yourself along, like you were climbing up a mountain. Take one step at a time.’ Her mind went to Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Kidnapped. When Davy was ill with his chest and couldn’t breathe he had done something like this. ‘I’ll count. We’ll keep going for fifty seconds and then you can stop for a rest.’
They were, she reckoned, now about three-quarters of the way along the tunnel, getting nearer to its mouth. She did the sum rapidly in her head while mechanically counting aloud in a low voice. About another two hundred yards, if they were lucky, she thought optimistically. Sam did not manage the first fifty yards without stopping for another agonizing convulsion, but she got him going more quickly, drawing him along at a steady pace. It was heart-breaking to listen to him, but he was no better when he stopped, so she kept tugging him on.
‘I think I can smell the air of the fields; you’ll be much better now,’ she said with false assurance. He had been faltering, but her words heartened him, and she picked up on the counting again. She even skipped from thirty-one to forty-two and they reached the fifty mark without a breakdown. ‘Eamonn was telling me about the sea,’ she said, hoping to distract him. ‘He said that we would go there, one day. I’ve never even seen the sea. He loves a place called Ballycotton. He said the air is great up on the cliffs. It blows all the way from America. Great for bad chests, he said.’ Her own heart was beating with slow violence. What if Sam collapsed completely? Could she possibly carry him? But then he moved forward and they began to make progress. Only a hundred yards, now, she told him.
They had to stop twice more, but each time she managed to get him moving again, pretending to smell the air, trying to keep his mind fixed on streams and cliffs and then, in desperation, talking about the night of the big wind, a few years before the great famine when her mother’s grandmother found a five-pound note blowing across the field on the following morning. He still coughed, that hard, dry cough and he still wheezed, but the terrible crowing sound seemed to have stopped for the moment.
‘Another fifty yards,’ she said as much to herself as to him.
The pale grey of the tunnel entrance now had changed into a misty green. It was hard to see out, or perhaps that was just the effect of their long time in the darkness of the tunnel, but as they came nearer, she realized that it was not anything to do with her eyes.
Outside the tunnel there was a thick dense fog.
Eileen began to feel better. This was ideal. It would be impossible for any soldiers to see them. In fact, the fog would probably make them give up the chase and get into their lorry and try to negotiate their way back to the city. That was, of course, supposing that the fireman had not told what he had seen in the tunnel. She tried to put this possibility from her mind. She was sure the train hadn’t stopped at the end of the tunnel. Its brakes, someone had told her, took about four hundred yards to bring it to a halt. Would they bother to stop and report the sighting of two people in the tunnel, just because they saw some soldiers in the distance in the fields? Eileen tried to put the matter from her mind, dismissing the possibility that there might be soldiers with guns standing ready for them when they emerged.
But now she was worried that Sam might not make it. Every breath that he took seemed to her terrified mind as if it might be his last. The sound was thin and high, and from time to time he had to stop and clutch at his chest. Was he having a heart attack, she wondered, with a panic-stricken memory of her grandmother’s sudden death when she had been a very small child? Did people die of asthma? She didn’t know.
‘Only a little bit further now,’ she said. Her voice sounded casual and unworried, but her own heart was thumping with acute terror. When they finally reached the end of the tunnel, a terrible paroxysm of wheezy dry coughing broke from him and he held on to the sprouting branch of an elderberry as though it were the only thing between him and death.
‘Let’s find somewhere for you to sit down out of the wet,’ she said as cheerfully as she could manage. The ground around them was littered with pieces of rock that had been chipped away when the hillside had been tunnelled out. Most of them were an awkward shape, not worth carting away for building material, but she saw a flat, smooth piece that was half buried by the small hillock behind it. She scrabbled with her nails at it and managed to clear most of the wet moss from its surface. The fog was getting thicker and it did occur to her that even though it would help to keep them concealed, it was not the best air for Sam to breathe. There was nothing that she could do about that, though. She went back and coaxed him to stagger over to the stone and collapse onto it.
‘Are you feeling any better?’ she asked tentatively. He shook his head wordlessly. He had taken off his glasses and without them his eyes looked wide and frightened, she thought. And that terrified her. She hoped that he might reassure her; might say that he had been worse lots of times; that he would be all right in a minute. But he didn’t and his naked eyes told another story.
Turning over the possibilities in her mind, she took a decision and, despite the danger that if she left him he might die alone there on the hillside, she knew it was her only choice.
‘Sam,’ she said as steadily as she could manage, ‘I’m going to go and fetch Eamonn, one of the fellows that got you out of gaol, you remember him, the tall fellow wearing the clerical collar? He was a medical student and he has a box full of drugs and things that we took from a chemist shop. He’ll know what to do for you. He’s really good at digging out bullets and things.’
She looked at him hopefully, but he did not appear to be even listening to her; all of his attention was concentrated on the struggle to breathe.
‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ she promised and left him, then, before her resolution wavered.
The fog was so thick that there was no need for concealment so she went straight across the field, walking diagonally and trusting to her instincts. The farm was on top of the hill so she could not go far wrong if she continued to climb.
The fog began to diminish the higher she got. This often happened around here. It was a valley fog; often she had stood outside the farmhouse and looked down at what appeared to be a hollow filled with soft greyish white clouds. For a moment she wondered whether she should have somehow dragged Sam up here, but dismissed it. He could barely stumble a few feet along level ground. She had done the only possible thing, she told herself, and then was cheered by the sight of the enormous old Scots Pine tree that grew outside the house of the farmer who had lent them a place belonging to his dead uncle. Now she knew exactly where she was and she walked on the inside of the hedge that lined the country lane.
From time to time she thought she heard a sound behind her, but each time she stopped, there was nothing. Probably some farm dog, absent from his duties, in pursuit of a fox, now slinking home for his supper in the furtive way that those intelligent animals showed when they knew that they were in the wrong. Some day, she thought, when all of this is over and when Ireland, all thirty-two counties of it, was free, then she would get herself a dog. By then, of course, she would be studying medicine at the university at the expense of the new state. Her mind strayed over this happy dream and although she heard a sound again she did not take any notice, but slipped through the hedge at the right moment, crossed over the empty lane and went through the gate and up the avenue to their farmhouse. The lights were on in the sitting room and in the kitchen and upstairs in most of the bedrooms. It looked, she thought, with a surge of relief, as though the others had got back safely.
She had just lifted her hand to knock on the door, when a voice spoke from behind her.
‘What the hell do you think you are playing at?’
She spun around, but she knew who it was. He stood there in belted raincoat and slouch hat, all drenched with moisture. She couldn’t see his face, the hat hid that, but his voice was rough with anger and she quailed for a moment. There was always something rather dangerous about Tom Hurley.
It was Aoife who opened the door and her face was terrified, her eyes not on Eileen, but on the man who stood behind her. Eileen turned. Tom Hurley had a pistol in his hand and it was pointed directly at her. She stared him down ignoring Aoife’s gasp of horror.
‘You’d better put that thing away,’ she said. ‘It might go off.’
‘Get inside,�
� he said and the words exploded from him.
She gave a shrug. Really, she thought, why does he always have to be acting the dangerous outlaw? Her attention was taken by Eamonn who was coming down the stairs.
‘Oh, Eamonn,’ she said and then stopped. He had a sharp knife, dripping with water in his hand. ‘Is Fred all right?’ she asked.
‘He’s fine. We gave him some whiskey and then I dug the bullet out. He’s fast asleep and snoring now.’ Eamonn’s tone was uneasy and his eyes, like Aoife’s, were fixed upon Tom Hurley.
‘Shut that door, girl.’ Tom was definitely in very bad humour and Eileen could not altogether blame him. They were under his orders and they had undertaken an action without his knowledge. She hoped that he did not know about the soldiers, but his first words, when he had ushered them all into the sitting room, destroyed that wish.
‘Unauthorized gaol break, betrayal of a secret house to a pack of soldiers: I could have the lot of you court-martialled and shot,’ he said harshly.
‘The soldiers didn’t find this place, did they?’ Eileen turned to Eamonn and he shook his head silently. She breathed with relief and turned back to Tom Hurley.
‘I’m responsible,’ she said steadily. ‘It was my idea.’
‘What a surprise!’ he said sarcastically. The mouth of his pistol was still pointed steadily at her. ‘You’ve got too big for your boots, young lady,’ he said and glanced down at her feet, his eyes widening a little when they saw her mud-plastered bloomers which were now, she realized, drying into an odd pattern of dark grey with patches of vivid pink showing through.
‘I’ll pass sentence on you tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, get up to your room and stay there.’
She stared back defiantly at him. ‘You can do what you like with me,’ she said, ‘but there is a dying man down there in the valley.’
‘Man.’ His eyes went around, counting. They were all there, except for Fred. ‘What man?’
A Shocking Assassination Page 22
