by Joe Joyce
‘Not too far now,’ Duggan said when they had left the town a few miles behind. ‘Time to switch to the other map.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Gifford folded up the road map, tossed it on to the back seat and reached behind for the Ordnance Survey map. He unfolded it, looked at it for a moment, then turned it around the other way. ‘Can’t make head or tail of this.’
‘Can you find that road on the left we just passed?’
‘I can’t even see the road we’re on.’
Duggan slowed to a stop near a gate with a small structure behind it. A whiff of cow dung came through the open windows as he propped the map against the steering wheel and studied it for a moment. ‘Second next turn on the left, I think.’ He traced the route from where he thought they were with a finger and handed the map back to Gifford. As he drove off again, they waved to a young boy hanging over the gate, his feet on a slanted board. He watched them with a solemn expression and didn’t wave back.
Duggan drove slowly, watching for a gap in the hedges which would indicate a turn-off. He wasn’t sure if the road they wanted would warrant a signpost in normal times, but there were no signposts now anyway: they had all been taken down as an invasion precaution. It seemed to take an age to find it.
‘This is a road?’ Gifford asked, with an air of incredulity, as they turned into it. It was just the width of the car, two tracks of beaten-down earth with grass running between them.
‘Just like Grafton Street or one of those,’ Duggan laughed, winding up his window quickly as an overhanging bush brushed against the side of the bonnet.
Gifford copied his action on his side. ‘What if we run into another car down here?’
‘There won’t be any cars down here unless they’re up to no good.’
‘Just like us.’
‘Exactly.’
They continued on for more than a mile and then turned into a track on the right and the bushes fell away and the land flattened out into a bog. The track was dry turf mould, compacted and rutted by cart wheels. Small clamps of greying turf, left over from the previous year, stood here and there by its side. Gifford viewed it all with amazement. ‘This is it?’ he asked.
‘This is it.’
They kept going, slowly, the car jolting over holes covered over roughly with branches across them, until the track was suddenly cut by a wide ditch a foot deep. Duggan stopped and turned off the engine and they got out in the silence. The ditch ran in both directions from the road, widening and deepening as it stretched away to the left, cutting through the heather, bog holes and small footings of turf, and into a distant wood.
‘Jesus,’ Gifford breathed.
Duggan imagined the pilot picking this piece of flat purple-and-brown earth for a crash landing. He must have kept the wheels up – or maybe hadn’t been able to lower them – and landed on the plane’s belly. And it had slid along here. ‘They were lucky,’ he said as he lit a cigarette, tasting the extra bite the fresh air gave the smoke. The bog had absorbed some of the impact, yielding more easily to the plane’s weight and energy than hard ground would have.
Gifford turned in a slow circle, feeling for the first time the sensation of standing on top of the world created by the flatness of the bog and the enormous dome of the open sky above them. Small birds twittered and hopped about and little tufts of bog cotton stood up here and there on their long stems, like white lights wavering above the heather. A couple of swallows swooped and dived high above, in one-sided dogfights with flies. A few hundred yards away, a man and a woman were bent over small heaps of turf they were building. When Gifford turned back to him, Duggan was already walking towards the couple.
Gifford caught up with him as he hopped across an old bog cutting and they continued together across the springy ground.
‘Don’t fall into a bog hole,’ Duggan said as they went by the edge of a black pool, flicking his half-finished cigarette into the water. Insects skated along its still surface. ‘They’re bottomless.’
‘And full of bodies.’
‘Probably.’
When they came up to the couple, Duggan said, ‘God bless the work,’ and the man and woman straightened up and wiped their foreheads with the backs of their hands. They looked to be in their
thirties, wearing old clothes, the woman a purple dress with a faded floral design, the man a collarless shirt and braces holding up grubby tweed trousers.
‘Great day for it.’ Duggan nodded at the piles of turf they were building out of the smaller footings.
‘ ’Tis,’ the man said. ‘Great year for the turf.’
‘We were just having a look at where the plane came down,’ Duggan offered.
‘Destroyed a good few turf banks,’ the man nodded. ‘Not to mention what had already been cut.’
‘I can see that,’ Duggan agreed. ‘Did you happen to see it yourselves?’
‘No, no,’ the man said. The woman stretched her shoulders and neck, the backs of her hands on her hips. ‘We don’t live around here. We’re from the next parish.’
‘Who’d be the nearest house to here?’
‘I wouldn’t know that now. You’d have to ask someone from the area.’
Duggan nodded as if the man had actually told him something. ‘Does the road go around to the wood over there?’ He indicated with his head where the Flying Fortress had ended up.
‘It does,’ the man said, giving the lie to his professed lack of local knowledge. ‘Just follow it round for a mile or so.’
‘Thanks,’ Duggan said. ‘Tough on the people who’ve lost their turf.’
‘They’ll feel it in the winter. But they say the Americans are going to pay compensation.’
‘Your bank escaped anyway.’
‘It did,’ the man said, giving him a rueful look. ‘But it might’ve been easier on the back if it hadn’t. And we’d got the compensation.’
‘That’s true,’ Duggan grinned back. ‘But there mightn’t be any turf or coal to be bought this winter.’
‘There’s always things to be bought by them that has the money.’
They left the couple and headed back to the car.
‘So, Sherlock,’ Gifford said, ‘what’d you learn from that?’
‘Fuck all,’ Duggan admitted.
‘I’m disappointed. I thought all that meaningless culchie chatter meant something.’
‘Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.’
‘That’s deep,’ Gifford snorted. ‘As bottomless as your bog holes.’
It took a seven-point turn to get the car facing back towards the road and they drove along it for well over a mile until they came to the wood that bordered the bog. Duggan pulled in to a gateway where the ground was badly cut up with what looked like tractor tracks. They followed the tracks on foot through the trees, noting where some smaller trees had been chopped down to make way for them, until they came to where the Flying Fortress had ended up.
The air was still, the leaves on the undamaged trees unmoving, as if the wood and everything in it was holding its breath. To one side, they could see where the plane had burst into the trees from the bog like an angry fist. Some trees were toppled, branches were torn off others, and the ground was churned up, roots exposed and left dangling in mid-air. Bits of Plexiglass glinted in the raw earth and smears of silver paint were cut into trunks. Small fragments of metal were scattered about with bits of wood on what had been a carpet of moss.
They walked around separately in silence and came together at a large oak tree, its lower branches sheared off and a deep gash cut in its trunk about ten feet up. Duggan looked at Gifford and shook his head. Gifford nodded, silent for once.
Back in the car, Duggan reversed on to the road, turned back the way they had come and drove up to a two-storey farmhouse they had passed earlier. A sheepdog announced them, barking furiously while carefully keeping its distance as they got out and went to the hall door. It was opened by a middle-aged woman in a wrap-around housecoat.
&n
bsp; ‘Sorry to bother you, ma’am,’ Duggan said. ‘We were wondering if you could tell us anything about the plane that crashed in the wood?’
She looked from one to the other, her round face closing, and back to Duggan again. ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ she said.
‘Did you hear the crash?’
‘Are you from the papers?’ She glanced from Duggan to Gifford again.
‘No, ma’am,’ Duggan said. ‘We’re from the Forestry Department.’
‘What’s the Forestry got to do with it? That’s a private wood.’
‘Is it your wood?’
She shook her head in an unconvincing denial.
‘We just happened to be in the area and thought we’d take a look at it. To see what kind of damage an air crash can do to the trees.’
‘I didn’t want to see it,’ she said with a little shiver. ‘I haven’t gone in there. You’d have to talk to himself about it.’
‘Is he around?’
‘No, he’s gone for the day. Helping his brother with the hay.’
‘He must’ve been one of the first to get there.’
‘He’s not the better of it yet. The poor man, the one that was dead, was a terrible sight. And the others didn’t look much better.’
‘How did they manage to get them out of there?’
‘It took a lot of work,’ she said. ‘Gerry was the first there, but he had to wait for help before they could get the poor lads out. A terrible sight.’
‘They did a great job.’
‘One of the men had a little diesel left for his tractor and they brought them to hospital on the trailer.’
‘Probably saved the lives of the other two,’ Duggan nodded.
‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ the woman said, narrowing her eyes.
‘Just what I’ve heard around,’ Duggan shrugged. ‘It was a good thing it didn’t explode anyway.’
‘It might as well have. There were bits of it all over the place. The bog as well.’
‘But they’ve taken it all away now. Nothing left but the damaged trees.’
‘They were at it for days. Coming and going with big trucks.’
‘Who were they?’
‘I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t talking to any of them.’
Gifford swore when they got back into the car. ‘If I hear another of these rambling culchie conversations I might pull out my gun and put a bullet in someone’s brain.’
‘Not mine, I hope,’ Duggan said as he started the engine.
‘Probably my own.’
‘Patience,’ Duggan suggested. ‘You need to be more patient.’
‘I need to talk to people who can answer a question without asking one. Where to now?’
‘We’ll have a word with the LDF lieutenant who was in charge of the guard.’
They stopped outside the man’s school, a small two-roomed building near a crossroads. There was one house nearby and no other buildings. Gifford got out and looked around. ‘Where do the children come from?’ They could hear some of them reciting a multiplication table through the open window of one of the rooms. In the silence after the children finished, they could hear the hoarse double call of a corncrake from a nearby field.
‘Around here.’
They waited, leaning against the hot bonnet of the car, until they heard a rousing chorus of ‘Clare’s Dragoons’ and a small group of boys came bursting out of the door with yells and a tattered football. The boys were followed by girls, who disappeared down the roads in more sedate groups. A little later a middle-aged woman and a tall, thin young man emerged. He locked the door and handed the woman the key, and they came down the path.
‘Lieutenant Ganly?’ Duggan asked as they approached.
The man stopped and said, ‘See you tomorrow’ to the woman as she kept going, with a nod to Duggan and Gifford.
‘I’m Captain Paul Duggan from army headquarters in Dublin.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Ganly looked like he wasn’t sure whether he should salute or not. He was in his mid-twenties and his thinness and long narrow face made him look taller than he actually was.
‘Paul.’ Duggan put out his hand.
‘Tommy.’ Ganly shook it.
‘I wanted a word with you about the Flying Fortress.’
‘There was another man here from headquarters at the time.’
‘Captain Anderson.’
Ganly nodded and a slight smile broke his serious look. ‘We had a good night in the local pub. He’s a good singer. A great voice.’
Duggan nodded as if he knew that, although he hadn’t. ‘What did you find when you got there?’
Ganly took a deep breath and blew it out. ‘It was the day after we were mobilised and got there. So the crew was gone but all the wreckage was still there. I’ve never seen anything like it. That plane was huge and the wreckage was . . . ’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know how anyone came out of it alive. It was just mangled.’
Duggan held out his open cigarette case and lit cigarettes for both of them. Shouts from the field beside the school, where two long sticks stood upright as more-or-less-straight goalposts, reached an angry crescendo. Ganly turned to them and shouted, ‘Hey!’ The shouting subsided.
‘There were strips of metal torn off the sides, rolled up like paper,’ Ganly said, turning his attention back to Duggan. ‘The side of the cockpit where the co-pilot had been was smashed almost flat against a big oak tree. He hadn’t a chance. There was a wing that had cut through some saplings and then broken up against some trees. One of the engines was half buried in the ground. Enormous things.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘I don’t know how the whole thing ever got off the ground at all.’
‘What about the cargo?’
‘There was still some stuff scattered around when we got there. Broken bottles of whiskey. And some boxes that had burst open and scattered tins of food. Some mashed-up cartons of cigarettes. You couldn’t smoke them.’
‘I’ve heard about all that stuff. Did you see any boxes of equipment?’
‘There was a broken-up typewriter,’ Ganly said, exhaling another lungful of smoke as he thought. ‘Somebody mentioned typewriter ribbons too, but I didn’t see them.’
‘Any mechanical equipment? Optical equipment?’
Ganly shook his head. ‘Not when we were there. To be honest, a lot of stuff had gone before we got there. Even when we did arrive, there were lots of treasure hunters on the bog, mostly young lads. But we’d been told only to guard the plane. We didn’t have the numbers to cordon off the bog area.’
‘Sure,’ Duggan nodded. ‘The plane itself was the most important thing.’
‘This equipment you’re looking for? Was this what the Yank was after as well?’
‘What Yank?’ Duggan asked, although he knew the answer.
‘A fellow from the American legation in Dublin. The cultural attaché.’
‘Did he tell you what he was looking for?’
‘A bombsight.’
Duggan covered up his surprise that Linqvist would have admitted what he was looking for. But that made it more likely that word had circulated back to the German legation, explaining how the man he had met in Lisbon knew about it. ‘He was telling everybody that?’
Ganly nodded. ‘Said there’d be a reward for anyone who found it.’
‘How much?’
Ganly gave a slight smile. ‘He didn’t put a figure on it. Dollars, he said. A reward in dollars.’
‘Did he say why they wanted it back?’
‘It was an expensive thing. But no use to anyone else. And they were afraid the finder might dump it because he wouldn’t be able to use it for anything, or even sell it.’
Duggan dropped his cigarette on the gravel at the edge of the road and buried it with the toe of his shoe. ‘Anyone flashing dollars around recently?’
‘Not that I heard of.’
‘Anybody emigrating to America all of a sudden?’ Duggan asked, thinking of Gerda.<
br />
‘Don’t know of anyone yet,’ Ganly said, following Duggan’s example, dropping his cigarette butt on the ground and rubbing it out with his foot. ‘He only offered it last week.’
‘Last week?’ Duggan asked in surprise. So that couldn't explain how the Germans in Lisbon knew about it after all.
‘He was down fishing in Lough Conn and just dropped by on his way. Had a load of fishing gear in the car and an old man with him.’
‘The American Minister? Mr Gray?’
‘I don’t know who he was. I was in town and dropped into Curley’s for a pint, and they’d just been there. On their way back to Dublin after staying in one of the big houses near the lake for a few days’ fishing. They said.’
‘And that’s when he offered the reward?’
‘The locals were all talking about it after they’d left. One of them asked me what a bombsight looked like. As if I’d know.’
‘Do you think someone has it?’
Ganly shrugged. ‘If they have, they’re not going to tell anyone till they get the dollars. And maybe not then.’
‘So where does that leave us?’ Gifford asked as they drove away, passing two of the young footballers dragging their feet through the dust at the side of the road. ‘Snookered,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘Nobody’s going to give you the yoke for a few packets of fags and a few bags of coffee when they can sell it for mighty dollars.’
Duggan gave a dejected nod of agreement. It had seemed like a workable plan. He'd thought that whatever people found and didn't want for themselves would have found its way to the local black-marketeers. Who might have been happy to trade something like the bombsight for things that were easier to sell. But Linqvist’s reward had changed everything.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Duggan said. ‘This Norden bombsight is a big military secret. And here are the Americans telling everybody in Mayo about it.’
